[mythtv-users] Third Tuner, Slave or Master?

Ryan Steffes rbsteffes at gmail.com
Wed Sep 12 14:59:22 UTC 2007


I am definitely not a master of the high performance machine.  I'm
strongly considering adding a third turner to my set up, and I'm
trying to figure out the best way to go about it.  My current machine
gives the distinct impression of being a bit overloaded now as far as
IO goes, but I really don't know how to go about tuning it properly to
improve performance so I'm more or less stuck with what I've got, or
blindly following suggestions given by helpful mailing list peoples.

My current set up:

1 Combination Frontend/Master backend
1 Combination Frontend/Slave backend
1 Sometimes on slave backend

My master has the following:

2 x PVR150
2 IDE drives (MythVideo, system files, swap)
2 SATA drives (1 Storage Group, 1 directory per drive)

My always on slave has a slow laptop hard drive with about 20 Gigs
free in it and the two storage directories mounted via NFS.

I was thinking about putting a new tuner in the slave and writing to
the directories via NFS because I was concerned that the PCI bus may
get overloaded (I do get occasional buffer overruns while watching TV
and recording from both tuners) due to network traffic just the same
as if I put the new tuner in the master.

Now I'm thinking adding another storage directory on the slave, which,
if I understand the storage group concept correctly, it'll write to by
default, then adding a cron job to copy the files over to the main
storage groups each night when the master is unlikely to be recording.


Any advice would be appreciated,

Ryan

PS I blame network TV for this.  After years of two recorders being
more than plenty, suddenly they are actually putting a few shows that
look like they may be worth watching on, and in the fall against my
basketball game line ups!

PPS Does anyone have any thoughts on the relative value of getting a
HD Tuner when I don't have any HD TVs to record broadcast HD?  If I
understand it correctly, I can get that just via antenna despite
having basic analog cable, right?


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