[mythtv-users] Slowdown with higher res display

[Cool Frood]

On 4/25/07, Michael T. Dean <mtdean at thirdcontact.com> wrote:
> 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?).
>

Yes, that's correct.  I type faster than my mind thinks :-)

> >   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).
>

I'm using Titivillus.  There are some pretty large images in there.
I'm assuming that not all of them are loaded at the same time.  If
they are, I should at least get rid of Torrentocracy that I installed
but never use.

> > 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).
>

Thanks for the info.  I'll try out Minimalist-wide and see how it goes.

> 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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