[mythtv-users] Myth Guide on slow backend hardware

[Glenn Chubak]

I've been using myth for about 6 months now and love it.  My sytem consists of 
3 reasonably fast frontends (slowest PII800 - fastest AthonXP 3000) connected 
to an old dual PII-333 backend.  One of the frontends is diskless.   The 
backend has a pvr-500, 384MB ram and 160GB of raid 1 storage (I hate to get 
rid of this machine because it works well).   Currently all of this is on FC3 
with Myth 18.1 following Jarod's guide.  I'll upgrade to 0.19 when has been 
I've tested it on my devel box for a bit.

The system works great at everything except browsing through the guide (on any 
of the frontends) is very slow.  It scrolls up/down at perhaps 1 channel per 
second.  As such traversing the approx. 400 channels (cable and sattellite) I 
have can be rather taxing.  Also if the channel up/down button is held on the 
remote or keyboard for more than a few seconds I need to wait for up to a 
couple of minutes for the guide to scroll far enough to clear the keypresses 
in the buffer.  This is rather annoying.

Now obviously faster hardware would help but are there any other suggestions?  
Watching "top" on the backend while scrolling the guide on the frontend does 
not suggest anything obvious.  mysql is at about 30%  of a single CPU.  Other 
than that the backend is not heavily loaded (top says about 75% idle).  It 
seems that a system which can feed 3 streams while recording 2 others (I'm 
not sure I've tried all of this at once but I've never had any trouble under 
normal usage) should be able to feed simple channel info at a good rate.  Can 
anyone point to a configuration problem or mysql tweak that would improve 
matters?

Thanks,
Glenn