[mythtv-users] Moving through "Watch Recordings" slow?

Larry K lunchtimelarry at gmail.com
Fri Sep 28 01:58:17 UTC 2007


I recently upgraded from 0.18 to 0.20 (and a corresponding video driver
upgrade from 7174 to 9746) and I am seeing this problem as well.  The first
time I enter the recordings screen, all seems well, but shortly thereafter,
every navigation is painfully slow, including the menu to delete a
recording.

I have observed that my normal mythfrontend CPU consumption is about 15%,
but when this recording menu problem arises, the mythfrontend CPU
consumption jumps up to 25%.  The CPU runs at 25% even if I just sit idling
on that screen.  If I leave that screen and go back one level and sit,
mythfrontend CPU drops to 0% as expected.

I have done several of the recommended tests, to include:

   - remove thumbnails and re-gen with mythweb
   - ls -al on my video directory to test disk responsiveness (it is very
   good for 150 recordings on xfs file system)
   - verify that the BIOS is not spinning the disks down
   - run optimize on the mythconverg database (no change)
   - set up monitoring to log slow SQL (none found)

So it would seem the problem is not thumbnail, SQL, or disk related.  One
thing I did notice, tho.  I have some recordings that came over from the
0.18 system and these files have a .nuv extension.  All 0.20 recordings have
a .mpg extension.  Does this matter?  Could the 0.20 frontend be having
trouble with these older recordings?

Any advice appreciated....

Larry

On 2/13/07, Jonathan Rogers <jonner at teegra.net> wrote:
>
> On Thu, 2006-12-14 at 09:26 -0500, Ryan Duffy wrote:
> >
> > > this is slow all the time, its like 2.5 to 3.0 seconds each time I
> > > move up and down.
> >
> > Mine is slow (about 2-3 seconds) but only after watching a recording
> then exiting back to the recordings list. If I back out one more menu level,
> and move back into the recordings list, it is very quick to move between
> recordings again.
>
> I have almost exactly the same problem that Ryan Duffy describes. When
> mythfrontend first starts up, it is responsive to input from keyboard
> and lirc remote. After playing a recording (which has no significant
> performance problems), moving through the recordings list is much
> slower. Going back to the top level menu, then back to the recordings
> list doesn't always fix the problem, though restarting mythfrontend
> always does. Navigating to certain other menus, such as system status,
> seems to reset mythfrontend to its responsive state.
>
> I have been seeing this problem starting with 0.19, then on 0.20, and
> now on SVN from a few days ago. I have thought it could be CPU load,
> video driver, or permissions related, but I believe I've eliminated all
> those possibilities. This problem seems unrelated to what else is
> happening on the system. The CPU is an Athlon64 x2 3800, which has no
> trouble playing back HD recordings. The video card is a Radeon 9600 with
> Xorg's radeon driver, which handles video playback fine. There are two
> drives, one WDC SATA drive and one Seagate UATA-100 drive, set as master
> by itself.
>
> There is one filesystem for recordings on each disk (using the new
> storage groups feature), and both frontend and backend users can read
> and write to both locations. The Seagate drive spins down most of the
> time, since it only contains recordings. There is an additional delay
> while it spins up, but I was already aware of this and it's unrelated to
> my ongoing problem. I tried removing all the PNG thumbnails. Recreating
> them introduced additional delays, but after that was done, the problem
> I'm trying to fix is still there.
>
> Based on my observations, I think it has to be a problem within
> mythfrontend, since it seems to only depend on its internal state. I'm
> wondering if it could have something to do with mythfrontend's MySQL
> connections. Or, perhaps it's somehow related to running on an SMP
> system. I also have a separate MythTV system with only a Duron 800, one
> UATA hard drive, and a PVR-350 for output. It's running 0.20. Though it
> has much lower overall performance, it doesn't have the slow recordings
> menu problem and generally performs quite well for an SD Mythbox.
>
> Jonathan Rogers
>
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