[mythtv-users] Proposed future power saving networked configuration (0.22 in mind)

[Chris Pinkham]

* On Tue Feb 17, 2009 at 05:00:10PM +1100, glenhawk at optusnet.com.au wrote:
> 0.22 is rumored to bring about the dynamic waking and sleeping of
> slave backends. With this in mind you could have a Master-Backend
> with only one tuner (or even none if you need the slot for something
> else) and lots of storage and then every other system could be a
> combined frontend/slave-backend systems.

On my production systems, I'm currently running my patch to allow
the master to wakeup and shutdown slaves on demand and it is
working very well.

According to my logs, my slave backend with my 2 air2pc ATSC cards in
it has only been online for a total of 9 hours over the past 7 days.
All of these were during primetime.  Most nights, the 2 tuners in
my HDHomeRun were enough to handle my normal recording load.  Once
HDHR multirec goes in, I anticipate the slave with the air2pc tuners
will get even less use.  A next step is to move 2 or maybe all 3 of
my AverMedia M179 cards out of my master backend and into another WOL
slave since they're not in use most of the day either.  I knew all
those mini-desktop P3-733 boxes I picked up from work would come in
handy at some point. :)

I just made a few tweaks to the code tonight to handle situations where
an in-progress program is scheduled to be recorded and the slave needs
to be immediately woken up, but I anticipate I'll have the patch in
SVN in a week or two at the most.

> When the system needs another tuner it looks to see if someone has
> a FE/SBE running (someone watching TV) and either uses it's tuner or
> wakes another FE/SBE. The FE/SBE systems would record to the HDDs in
> the Master Backend server because while this may take a lot of network
> resources (with a gigabit network there shouldn't be a problem) it

When I move my M179 cards out of my master, I intend on moving the
HDHR to the master for now, but I want to eventually just hang that
off the fileserver on a dedicated nic.  This means I intend on looking at
changes to the backend to make a tuner-less master backend an officially
supported configuration.

--
Chris