[mythtv-users] Better listings for Schedules Direct users. Free! (was Re: another scheduling strangeness/question)

Michael T. Dean mtdean at thirdcontact.com
Tue Aug 31 23:50:19 UTC 2010


  On 08/31/2010 05:31 PM, Michael T. Dean wrote:
>  On 08/31/2010 05:24 PM, Yeechang Lee wrote:
>> Michael T. Dean says:
>>> I'm planning to make changes to mythfilldatabase so that it always
>>> retrieves all of the data (at minimum tomorrow through +13) for
>>> Schedules Direct users.
>> Would --refresh-all --refresh-today be sufficient to accomplish this
>> today?
> No.  That would be /very/ bad.  The problem now is that 
> mythfilldatabase makes 2 separate requests--one to get each of today 
> and +13.  (And, in truth, it can make additional requests to get +12 
> and +11 and ... if it detects significant holes in the listings.)  
> Using --refresh-all makes /13/ requests (+1 through +13) and adding 
> --refresh-today adds a 14th request.
>
> AIUI, Robert has said that pulling all the data most likely woudn't be 
> a problem (more testing still required, so please bear with us :) if 
> it was done as a single request for all 14 days of listings.  To 
> handle this properly and reliably on all our users' systems, we need 
> some changes to the code and, possibly, to the MythTV database 
> schema.  We're planning these changes, but they will take some time.

And, now it's time to come clean.  What I hadn't said is that we 
actually have full support for grabbing all days of listings data from 
TMS in a single pull.  It's been this way for quite some time (including 
in 0.23-fixes, and possibly even 0.22-fixes).

After discussion with some of the Schedules Direct board and a lot of 
effort, including testing, by people such as Robert Eden and Chris 
Petersen, we've decided to "advertise" this approach.  Since it works in 
0.23-fixes as well as trunk, users may enable its use immediately.

However, use of --dd-grab-all has not been optimized, so it can take 
significantly more CPU and RAM than a "normal" run of mythfilldatabase.  
Users with resource-limited backend systems may not be able to use the 
argument.  We also ask that those users who cannot use --dd-grab-all do 
not use --refresh-all, either.  Instead, they should run with default 
refresh options.

Please see http://svn.mythtv.org/trac/changeset/26033 for more 
information (including how to enable its use in automatic 
mythfilldatabase runs), and--if you have a sufficiently-powerful master 
backend system--please enable --dd-grab-all.  It will help TMS as much 
as it helps you.

(And, for those who are wondering, even though I was holding out on you 
when it came to information, I wasn't silently benefiting from what I 
knew.  I have never used --dd-grab-all on my systems.  That said, I will 
be enabling it, now that we have approval to do so.)

Enjoy,
Mike


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