[mythtv-users] thrashing hard drive

[Brad DerManouelian]

On Sep 24, 2008, at 12:41 PM, jansenj wrote:

>> I guess really the question is, what problem are you trying to solve?
>> Looking back at the OP, you didn't say you had any problems, just  
>> didn't
>> like the "head thrashing".  Obvious answers for your 1 disk  
>> situation is to
>> buy more disks and spread the load.
>
> You can obviously almost always throw more hardware at the problem, I
> was just curious if there are any setting that would help out be it in
> myth or in linux.

You can increase the buffer in linux so it writes to disk less  
frequently (storing it in memory until it writes to disk), but if  
you're swapping already, it wouldn't make much sense to start using  
*more* memory.

Also, if you increase the time it takes to write info to disk, you're  
increasing your chance of losing more data in memory that would  
normally be written to disk in the event of a catastrophic error  
(power loss, kernel panic, cat hits reset button, etc.) and this makes  
databases sad.

-b|d