[mythtv-users] restricting mythpreviewgen?

Alex Williamson alex.l.williamson at gmail.com
Tue Jan 22 20:08:54 UTC 2013


On Tue, Jan 22, 2013 at 12:33 PM, Michael T. Dean
<mtdean at thirdcontact.com> wrote:
> On 01/22/2013 12:07 PM, Alex Williamson wrote:
>>
>> For mythtv, I want an integrated environment that I
>> can deploy easily on frontend and backend, so I use mythbuntu.  I
>> certainly don't want to reboot my main server every time mythtv does
>> something weird and needs a reboot and I don't want to have a
>> dedicated, power hungry master backend.  I've been attempting to avoid
>> a dedicated slave, but the frustration and overall performance impact
>> is justifying the meager power consumption of a t5500 thin client
>> (5.5W) acting as an intermediary.  I'd consider something like a
>> raspberry pi for this job too, but I had the t5500 on hand and don't
>> need to worry about arm support.  Thanks,
>
>
> And a "power hungry" 25W at idle Core i system with plenty of headroom would
> cost about $25 per year, compared to your $5.50/year (for slave
> backend--assuming that 5.5W is actually what's being drawn by the whole
> system plus power supply/transformer).

It is.  Have you tried to build a 25W idle Core system?  I built my
desktop on an i3 2120T (35W - they get really pricey if you want
lower), small SSD, bunch of RAM, onboard graphics, 1 extra NIC,
80-plus P/S.  It runs something like 40W idle, and it cost several
hundred in parts.  Not to mention the maintenance cost, cpu fan will
eventually fail, p/s fan will eventually fail, ssd will eventually
fail.  The diskless t5500 has a way higher mtbf.  Consolidating the
master on my fileserver, that I need anyway, is one less piece of
hardware to maintain and this slave that's getting everyone so ruffled
has nothing in it to fail... oh, and if it does I've got another in
the closet that I can swap in it's place.

>  Oh, of course, there's also the
> cost--paid out of your time--of working around the limitations of a system
> that's the wrong tool for the job...
>
> IMHO, the difference between a 5.5W system and a 25W system is not $20/yr in
> electricity cost, but is simply the difference between a system that's
> completely wrong for running MythTV and one that's exactly what MythTV
> expects.

You're welcome to your opinion.

> And, if you just make that 25W-idle Core i system a combined frontend/master
> backend system (which may raise idle power usage about 7W if you add a
> discrete nvidia video card), you may well be using less power than
> VM-processing-load+5.5W remote backend+frontend system.

Ha, 7W nvidia graphics card.  Not that I need one in a dedicated
backend, but a typical low-end, fanless card is 2x that.

Thanks for your opinion, I'm confident there's a software solution to
this problem.

Alex


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