[mythtv-users] Config suggestions for powerful MythTV Backend

Steven Adeff adeffs.mythtv at gmail.com
Fri Jun 1 13:14:17 UTC 2012


On Thu, May 31, 2012 at 3:34 AM, James Robertson <j at mesrobertson.com> wrote:
> I have recently aquired a Dell Poweredge 2600 Server with Dual Xeon
> X5355 CPU's, 16GB RAM, 6x146GB 15K SAS disks and a PERC 5i RAID
> controller.  I have a Hauppauge WinTV Nova-T-500 and 2X1TB Sata disks
> to install in it.

fun! and lucky! (though I'm guessing you "paid" for it?)


> I have been contemplating the best ways to configure it as a MythTV
> backend, but would love some feedback and suggestions.
>
> My intitial plan is as follows:
>
> OS:  Debian Squeeze AMD64 (netinstall and no GUI)

no ish there, as they say, use what you're comfy with.

> 2x 146GB disks in RAID1 for OS and MythTV Database
> 4x 146GB disks in RAID10 to host the LiveTV directory (if I was
> feeling reckless I could do RAID0 across all of them).

don't bother using RAID, no advantage for Myth, also no reason to
separate LiveTV. just throw all six into a storage group and let Myth
sort it out. that said, even 6x146GB isn't a lot of storage if you're
doing HD.

> 2X 1TB Sata disks in RAID1 to store pictures, movies, music and

unless you have a specific need to have redundant backup for all that,
I would say you're better off dropping some money on a specific drive
for backing up what you want, on another network connected machine,
and taking advantage of all 2TB of storage. RAID is great, until both
drives die at the same time. even with the flooding, hard drive prices
are cheap.

> general file sharing on the network.
> File System:  LVM with XFS.

Any specific reason for LVM? another option is mhddfs which I've been
quite happy with for making network share available with "space
management".


> And what to do with all that RAM!! Could I utilise some of it in a RAM
> DISK? as I will probably be hard pressed to push 512MB from the OS and
> apps.  Would placing Live TV recordings in a Ram disk provide any real
> benefit?  What about giving MySQL more RAM?

in theory you could do a RAM disk for the database, with frequent
writes to disk for backup. the other is to just tweak the MySQL
settings to let it use the other 14GB of ram (I'd save around 2GB for
all the other things you'll be running), I think, in the end, this has
been shown to be the better use of RAM.

> I have done a bit of research and I am going to read over the
> Optimizing Performance Wiki article again. but would appreciate some
> advise from seasoned MythTV users and developers.

have fun!

-- 
Steve
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/User:Steveadeff
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