[mythtv-users] Randomly crashing Mythtv combined backend and frontend

[Bill Meek]

On 05/18/2013 02:01 PM, Antony Gelberg wrote:
> On Sat, May 18, 2013 at 9:21 PM, Bill Meek <keemllib at gmail.com> wrote:
...
> Hi Bill and thanks for the input.
>
> I'm just sticking my oar in here as:
> 1) Stephen (the OP) is maintaining a system for me (actually my parents'
> system).
> 2) I'm antgel on IRC who you referred to above.
>
> Small world.  :)
>
> I can add that at present, we have set --loglevel debug, but no -v.
>
> What has been happening is that the backend has been crashing "randomly".
>   As Stephen said, we now have a debug build, which we hope will output a
> core dump - plus we are running --loglevel debug.  The high CPU utilization
> of mythlogserver is (in my opinion) less of a concern than the crashes,
> although if you are telling us that -v general will very likely output as
> much error information as we will need to debug our crashes (stack trace
> notwithstanding), I guess we could add it if it will reduce the load on
> mythlogserver.
>

I was looking at the pastebin from IRC: http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=yaXDhB84

and saw: /usr/local/bin/mythbackend --daemon --pidfile /var/run/mythtv/mythbackend.pid --logpath /var/log/mythtv/ -v all --loglevel debug

That's where I came up with the -v all. The errors quoted in the original post
don't print otherwise (or -v siparser,record would have allowed them.)

Given that this has been happening so frequently, your --loglevel debug is fine
for starters, and then, based on the core dump perhaps add to that. But that's just
what I do, and have read from others on this list. -v general is the default if
no -v is given.

It will be interesting to see if the debug build stops the logserver noise as it
did in the other case I cited.

In my case, I know that my startup file (mythtv-backend.conf in *buntu) must have
the line: ulimit -c unlimited  before mythbackend is started in order to get a core
dump. I can't speak to Debian. Sounds like you've already found this:

     www.mythtv.org/wiki/Debugging

-- 
Bill