[mythtv-users] System hangs occasionally -- more memory didn't solve the problem

[John Finlay]

On 11/22/2014 7:49 PM, Dick Steffens wrote:
> On 11/12/2014 03:27 PM, Dick Steffens wrote:
>> On 11/11/2014 05:08 PM, MythTV MythTV wrote:
>>
>>> If you are running the 64bit Linux and Mythtv binaries for MythTv 
>>> then you might want to consider more memory.
>>
>> I found some memory locally. I added two 2GB sticks, so now I have 
>> 6GB instead of 2. We'll see what difference that makes.
>>
>> Thanks to all for your memorable advice.
>>
>
> The additional memory did not resolve the problem. Here's what I have 
> in top this evening:
>
> top - 10:57:51 up 9 days, 19:55,  2 users,  load average: 1.02, 1.04, 
> 1.05
> Tasks: 167 total,   1 running, 166 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
> Cpu(s): 50.4%us,  0.0%sy,  0.0%ni, 49.6%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi, 0.0%si,  
> 0.0%st
> Mem:   5950572k total,  2183428k used,  3767144k free,   127104k buffers
> Swap:  2061308k total,    33428k used,  2027880k free,  1071056k cached
> Write failed: Broken pipe
> rsteff at ENU-1:~$ PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+ COMMAND
>  2735 rsteff    20   0 3243m 418m  46m S  100  7.2  14156:06 
> mythfrontend.re
>  4795 rsteff    20   0 17336 1364  968 R    0  0.0  16:09.56 top
>     1 root      20   0 24460 2148 1224 S    0  0.0   0:00.44 init
>
>
> Is there anything in there that provides any clues on where to look next?
>

I had a problem similar to yours with my mythbuntu FEs using the 
mythbuntu theme. When the FE was in standby and the BE started a 
recording the CPU usage would increase by quite a bit. After a number of 
recordings it seemed that the FE CPU usage would 'stick' at over 100% 
and the FE would hang. Once I disabled standby mode I had no further 
problems. It seems that the mythbuntu theme uses alphapulse animation 
which causes excessive CPU usage on some systems. See:

https://code.mythtv.org/trac/ticket/12124

for more details if you are using the mythbuntu theme.

John