[mythtv-users] After 7y5m running, time to start from scratch after update to .27?

Matthias Thyroff lists at thyroff.net
Fri Nov 22 21:16:25 UTC 2013


Hello everybody,

sounds sad, after 7 years and 5 months running, with 1 year 8 months 
recorded (I hope I havent watched that much TV, actually!), now it seems 
that I have to start my backend from scratch, my backend is giving my 
too much pain, and that started directly after updating to 0.27

As reported earlier on this list (with more information than I want to 
repeat here), there is the problem with the "mythcontext:backend is 
online" messages, which indicate that the remote frontend is loosing the 
contact to the backend appearently (but normally, no "is the backend 
started?" messages). I thought this might be because of the xmltv data, 
but I do not think that anymore, I do not know.

Anyway, no solution to that. I tried to increase logging verbosity, but 
I seem to be on "debug" and still the messages are not helpful to me. No 
messages at syslog either (like, SATA problems or something, not at all)

Now recently, it got worse, quite frequently, the backend goes to 100+% 
of CPU load, and the frontends get unresponsive when I enter the 
recording screen, they do not display any recordings (or they do, after 
more than 20minutes). Still the backend log is unconspiciuous.

Normally, when this happens, there is also a mythcomflag running, but 
that does not seem to be responsible: killing it does not repair the 
backend process.

Restarting the backend fixes the situation. This for me indicates that 
it is not hardware or mysql related.

Is my mythconverg overloaded? It is 2.0GiB in size. It resides on an 
SSD. The channel table is maybe a bit big, 3280 items. Definitely too 
big for my use case, many channels are duplicatedand I am not sure, why, 
I am only using less than 100 in my frontends. For example, I have 28 
duplicates of the channel RTL from source 3, all of them get their 
channel data from one xmltv run in the early morning (I still start 
mythfilldatabase from a cron script; I never straightened out the method 
of running it via housekeeping which was, I think, introduced with 0.25. 
I also still start optimize_mythdb.pl every time after the 
mythfilldatabase run).

I get messages regarding EIT scans when the backend is not behaving 
well, maybe a hint? But I always got them, in all versions, the backend 
was running fine anyway.

I have 456 recorded programs; 208 with autoexpire=0, 51 with 
autoexpire=9999 and the rest, autoexpire=1, =10000 and maybe others. I 
think I have too many programs marked as "do not delete", mainly because 
I only have about 1TB of expirable programs, i.e. useable space for new 
recordings.

I also get messages regarding autoexpiration when the backend behaves 
badly; but also these messages should be normal.

I wonder if I should start from scratch or maybe start cleaning up 
manually first. I appreciate any helping hand/hint.

My setup looks like that:

Backend headless server, dual core ivy bridge celeron 2.6GHz, 4GB Ram, 
60GB SSD (sandforce, running 15k hours, 8064GiB writes, 14.144GiB reads 
during the lifetime), 2 x 1.5TB WD green disks as recording space, both 
disks running for about 35k hours, healthy according to smart. Ubuntu 
12.04 32bit, mythbuntu repos. 2 dvb-s2 receiver cards (max 2 concurrent 
recordings per card as by configuration). MySQL data directory in /mysql 
on the SSD (that, and the mythfilldatabase runs should be the writes on 
the SSD, I would guess).

Several frontends, connected via GBit wired network (no network problems 
in other applications).

Do I have to start from scratch? I would want to recover the recordings, 
but I can initialize all other tables. I am sorry for the channels list 
though, starting from scratch means like one day of work, because the 
satellites give so many crap channels, editing the channels list is bad.

Is it worth cleaning up the database first? Removing duplicate channels, 
deleting recording rules etc?

I cannot recompile with debugging, that is beyond my scope.

I am tempted to go back to 0.26, but following the list, it seems I am 
the only one with these problems. Sigh.

As said above: I am grateful for any hint.

I have to get back to good WAF values, that is very important for me!

Thanks & Cheers,

Matthias



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