[mythtv-users] frontend UI freezes during menu changes

[voidtrance at comcast.net]

Hi all, 

I am loving the new 0.22 and all the improvements on the UI. It looks much more 
polished and hi-end and I especially love the screenshots and fanart, etc. in both 
the watched recordings screen and mythvideo. A great, big Thank You to all the 
people and developers involved in making this happen!! 

However, I am having several issues with the frontend UI which I wanted to mention 
on the list. I know that there are several threads discussing CPU usage of mythfrontend 
but I think that some of the issues that I am seeing are unrelated to that. 

1. In a lot of occasions, when switching from one menu to another (for example, from the 
top frontend menu to the Media Library menu) the menus freeze for about 10 seconds while 
both are being displayed. The best way I can describe this is that the menus freeze while the 
old menu is being faded out and the new menu is being faded in. There is nothing in the frontend 
log at the normal logging levels during this. 

2. It takes a long time to switch the fanart in both the watch recordings screen and mythvideo 
and while that is happening the UI freezes. I am using Storage Groups so I know that the 
frontend sends a request to the backend for the image instead of reading it directly. However, 
the frontend and the backend are running on the same machine and most of the time, the CPU 
load is not that great. 
I also noticed the following errors while trying to load some fanart in the Watch recordings screen: 

2009-11-19 19:19:00.691 MythSocket(5aa6a80:42): readStringList: Error, timed out after 7000 ms. 
2009-11-19 19:19:00.691 RemoteFile::openSocket(file data socket), Error: Failed to open socket, timeout 

When this error happens on the frontend, the backend has these entries in its log: 

2009-11-19 19:19:23.650 RingBuf(/video/groups/fanart//Burn Notice_fanart.jpg): Could not open /video/groups/fanart//Burn Notice_fanart.jpg. 
2009-11-19 19:19:23.654 MainServer, Warning: Unknown socket closing MythSocket(0x7fe7990ba740) 
2009-11-19 19:19:23.663 MythSocket(7fe7990ba740:-1): writeStringList: Error, socket went unconnected. 
We wrote 0 of 35 bytes with 1 errors 

The image is definitely there, as it sometime manages to show up in the frontend background and I have 
verified that it exists on the filesystem and is readable. 
On a separate note, these backend log entries show up a lot in my log, not only when using the Watch Recordings 
screen but also in mythvideo. 

3. This is probably another instance of the general UI slowness, but when I am exiting the frontend, 
it could take up to a minute or two to actually have it exit as evident my the following log snippet: 

2009-11-20 00:51:57.854 TV: Attempting to change from Watching Video to None 
2009-11-20 00:51:57.855 TV: Changing from Watching Video to None 
2009-11-20 00:51:57.882 ~OpenGLVideoSync() -- closing opengl vsync 
2009-11-20 00:52:48.167 Deleting UPnP client... 
2009-11-20 00:53:20.104 New DB connection, total: 1 

You can see that there is almost a minute between "closing opengl vsync" and "Deleting UPnP client" 

I am using a dual core Athlon64 3800+ (2GHz) and any graphics acceleration provided by the nvidia drivers, 
so my system should have the power to display the UI graphics and menus. 

As I said, I love the new UI and I am more then willing to help track this down with any logs and/or 
experiments, so please let me know if there is anything I can do? 


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