[mythtv-users] Front end memory usage

[Michael T. Dean]

Alberto Alonso wrote:

>I am finding more info on this. It seems to be mostly 
>related to theme and resolution. Going down to 640x480
>I now get 57M of RES usage, which is a heck of a lot
>better, but still rather large if you ask me.
>
>What theme and resolution are you using to the 17M
>resident?
>
>Also, does anybody know of any setting to set things up
>that maybe doesn't cache the whole theme stuff to memory?
>It seems that reading from disk on a page change should be
>fast enough.
>  
>
I'm using Minimalist-wide (which is appropriate for widescreen TV's).

Another Myth box I maintain shows:

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
32076 root      15   0 69764  26m  18m S  6.3  5.3 752:49.75 mythfrontend

And the guy who owns it uses visor--the theme with the clouds (a 
"complex" background image)--at 1024x768.

I really don't think it's the theme's being cached that's causing the 
problem.  The default theme, as distributed (XML descriptions and 
"unscaled" images), is only 2736KB, Minimalist wide is 2900KB, and visor 
is 2828KB.  On disk, my themecache (the scaled 
images)--Minimalist-wide.1920.1080--is 7776KB, and visor.1024.768 is 
5712KB.  Also, TTBOMK, Myth doesn't maintain the entire theme in 
memory.  Images are cached on disk as just described.  Also, since it 
notices changes to the XML theme files at runtime, it may not even keep 
the theme descriptions in memory (although I haven't looked at the 
source to verify this--it could also be checking modification times or 
something).

Regardless, I can't see the theme causing it to take 50-100MB of RAM.  
Maybe for a program like Windows Media Player, but this is MythTV.  ;)

You can check your theme size with:

du -sk /usr/local/share/mythtv/themes/<theme name>

You can check your themecache size with:

du -sk ~mythtv/.mythtv/themecache

Mike