[mythtv-users] Slowdown with higher res display

Michael T. Dean mtdean at thirdcontact.com
Wed Apr 25 22:06:26 UTC 2007


On 04/25/2007 04:50 PM, Cool Frood wrote:
> I recently moved from good old CRT TV to a 1600x1050 resolution LCD
> that I'm using as a TV.
I'm guessing a 1680x1050 (16:10 aspect, widescreen, right?).

>   After the switch, I find that MythTV is
> running a lot slower when switching between menu screen s.  Once the
> video gets going, the performance is fine, but it takes forever to
> move from the initial page to the list of recordings, or getting to
> the DVD archive menu, for example.  During this time, I see it doing a
> lot of disk activity.  I have a decent NVidia graphics card with 256
> MB of on-board RAM so I don't think that is the problem.
>
> My guess is that mythfrontend and/or X.org are now taking up a whole
> lot of RAM because of the much higher resolution (2.2x more pixels)
> and the system tends to thrash because I have only 512MB of RAM.  Is
> my hunch correct or am I missing something?
>   

Pretty much. 

ls -al ~/.mythtv/themecache/*/

shows you all the theme images that are loaded from (compressed) PNG's 
into memory (uncompressed).

> If the RAM is the limiting factor, what choices do I have?  Increase
> the RAM?  Is there any way to bring down the memory requirement
> without having to reduce the resolution?  It bothers me that video
> works fine but the static menus are so slow.

Use a simpler theme.  Try Minimalist-wide and I'll bet you'll see a 
speedup.  For best test results, make sure you restart mythfrontend, and 
ideally mythbackend, too (otherwise, times can be skewed by 
mythfrontend's requesting something from mythbackend, which has to read 
swapped data/code from the swap partition when that data/code may have 
only been swapped out because of your previous choice of theme).

If my guess about your screen being a widescreen is incorrect, you'll 
have to ask someone else about best theme choices.  I don't remember the 
4:3 themes.

Mike


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