[mythtv-users] frontend responsiveness on iscsi

[Joseph Fry]

> I am running a diskless frontend via iSCSI (added GPXE to boot rom)
> and it has served me well for well over a year.
>
> My only complaint is that things like artwork and channel icons seem
> to take much (.25 - .5 sec) longer to load than they do on my
> MBE/FE... its tolerable, but annoying because I know how fast it
> could/should be.  I am not sure it's iSCSI necessarily, it may just be
> the difference between a f dedicated frontend and a BE/FE combo.
>
> I may just put the frontend on a USB stick, but before I did that, I
> was wondering if there is any other way to make things respond a bit
> faster.  Prehaps moving a cache to a ramdisk (I could spare 500 MB of
> ram for it), or adjusting a setting to use memory instead of disk
> cache, or something like that.
>
> At some point I'll move that frontend over to a USB stick, or a cheap
> SSD.  It's my primary use frontend, and it needs to be silent (which
> is why I went diskless to begin with).
>
> Any suggestions would be appreciated.
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> Hiya - I've also been running a slave/fe like this for over 4 years.  For me
> it's fast enough, but waiting for ubuntu to boot is sometimes a bit slow.
> But's that's iscsi.  Starting mythfrontend is fine as it auto starts, and
> the delay is the OS load.

I have no complaints about the boot time... we typically only boot it
once a day and it is up and running by the time I sit down and get
settled in.

> I assume your running everything over a GB network that makes a big
> difference. 100Mbs iscsi is a tad slow.  If you're going to boot from usb
> stick - then I'm assuming USB 3 otherwise I can't imagine being that much
> faster.

I am on GB.


> Next time I refresh my h/w I'll move from iscsi back to a ssd a small mSATA.
> Fast boots are preferable when my partner sat in front of the TV.  Then
> again alot of modern TVs provide great dlna playbacks from nas', servers and
> I do wonder if I need a frontend on the TVs anymore.  We've kind of stopped
> using mythfrontend for playback and stream over twonky from our master
> backend to a sony tv, my slave syncs after it has finished recording.
>
> Given that they are not too expensive, if you want a springy launch, I'd
> just buy a SDD now.  Save you a lot of time.  I've use one is for my server
> for my iscsi disk paritions, it works well but does not deliver desktop
> performance as it's iscsi over Gigabit.
>

yeah an ssd is the obvious answer... I was just hoping I could do
something simple to improve responsiveness.  It may simply be the lag
of using a remote database.  My other frontends are significantly
slower (less ram/cpu) than this one, so I always attributed their
slowness to that.  However this frontend is actually about the same as
the backend as far as resources are concerned... and it is like night
and day moving between the two (those few fractions of a second really
hurt the smoothness of the interface).

I am actually considering making my primary frontend into the MBE as
well... just to get the speed, but I didn't want rotating disks in the
living room if I could avoid it.