[mythtv-users] how much is enough -- configuring a server

[Tom Dexter]

On Nov 15, 2007 5:39 AM, Mark Small <msmall at eastlink.ca> wrote:
>
>
> In such a system, your biggest bottleneck will likely be bandwidth to the hard
> disk(s).  If you've got 4 folks watching HDTV streams, that's a TON of data
> the gets written and read constantly.  Some sort of RAID setup, or 1 or more
> slave backends may be necessary.
>
> Thy only reason to have a beefy CPU for your setup is transcoding to mpeg4 to
> reduce file size.
>
> Mark
>
I suppose he might...it's hard to say.  I have only one frontend with
three HD-5500 cards in the backend.  I'm able to record three HD shows
at once while watching a fourth previously recorded show from the
frontend...that's a lot of IO.  My backend is a Dell 4600 with two 500
GB Seagate IDE drivers simply using a big vdeo LVW2 volume...and that
actually means the OS partition and even the database is on the same
physical drive as part of that LVM volume...which certainly isn't
ideal.  I've never had any noticeable issues.  I'm using ext3, so I
had to turn on slow deletes.

Of course with four cards there's a potential for five programs being
written and/or accessed at once...that could be pushing it.

 As far as CPU, I've checked it out while recording three shows and
watching a recording, and the backend is generally as 1-2%...pretty
much asleep.

Tom