[mythtv-users] What to do with lots of RAM?

[Simon Hobson]

Jerome Yuzyk <jerome at supernet.ab.ca> wrote:

>> With sufficient RAM and a modern processor, you should be able to run
>> commercial flagging in real-time, with at least one recording being
>> flagged on each processor core.  Doing that means that the flagging is
>> done from the buffers/cache instead of having to read the data back
>> from disk again, greatly reducing the disk usage and allowing more
>> recordings per drive to be done at the same time.
> 
> I was wondering if I could use this feature. It seems all-or-nothing though, not per-recording, so I put aside trying it out. But, with hardware encoding and VDPAU decoding my CPU only gets busy during commflagging, and even then not much. I am currently commflagging High Quality SD recordings at 20 minutes per hour (95fps).
> 
> I have a re-purposed Core2 Duo E4500 2.2G with 4G and reading a couple old list threads it seems I have enough horsepower for my simple SD recording environment.

I think you have more than enough. I run my backend on an HP Microserver with a dual core AMD Athlon(tm) II Neo N36L running at 1.3G and with 2G RAM. It has two DVB tuners and will quite happily record 4 or 5 programs across 2 drives. I limit jobs to a max of 2 (one  per core). It will commflag in real-time while recording.

But it doesn't run a frontend at all.

My frontend is a Pentium 4 2.8G dual core, which while watching a recording off BBC2 (which is generally at the higher end of the bitrate for SD Freeview) is running in the high 80s % idle.

I suspect you've enough performance for a combined BE&FE on your hardware without hardware decoding - with hardware decoding, it's hard to see how it wouldn't cope.