[mythtv-users] Machine lock up and disk thrashing

Fred Clausen fred at derf.nl
Mon Jun 11 11:55:29 UTC 2007


Hi,

Philip Stubbs wrote:
> Hi, I wonder if anybody can help?
> 
> I have recently installed MythTV on my desktop machine that is
> running Ubuntu 7.04. The setup was a bit of a pain, but it seems to
> be working well now. The back-end seems to be working great and I
> have left it running for a couple of days to record some shows that
> I thought may be interesting.
> 
> The problem I have is with the front-end running on the same machine.
> After it has been used for a little while, I will try and do
> something, like watch a different channel or recording, and the
> machine grinds to an almost halt, with the hard disk thrashing away.
> 
> The machine becomes so slow that I can't even run a virtual terminal
> so that I con see what process may be causing the problem.
> 
> Does anybody have any suggestions as to what the problem may be? How
> can I determine which process is killing the system when the whole
> thing becomes so sluggish that it is unusable?

When your machine is up and before it crashes, you can start top like so:

$ top -b > /var/tmp/top_log.txt

This will make each top iteration go to the file /var/tmp/top_log.txt. 
Then, when the machine dies, you can reboot and look at that file to see 
what proc was using the most CPU just before it died. Probably 
mythfrontend :)

Also, make sure you redirect the mythfrontend output to a file, you can 
then see if there are any messages that may explain the problem. If 
indeed it is mythfrontend.

Cheers,

Fred.


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