<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div><div>On Aug 15, 2007, at 7:21 AM, Craig Courtney wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 8/13/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">Brad DerManouelian</b> <<a href="mailto:myth@dermanouelian.com">myth@dermanouelian.com</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> On Aug 13, 2007, at 2:52 PM, Mark Lehrer wrote:<br><br>><br>>> different recordings. Therefore, I have ruled out bandwidth as an<br>>> issue. The problem comes is when I try to view something that's<br> >> currently being recorded. It happen with both LiveTV and scheduled<br>>> recordings. It happens when I'm near the live TV point or if I start<br>>> watching something nearing the end of the recording. I get rather <br>>> frequent pauses in the video so that it is unwatchable. Like every<br>>> 3-5 seconds. This is even with the master backend recording SD and<br>><br>><br>> I had a similar problem (though not quite as frequent). In my case, <br>> the write cache would fill up and write out every 30 seconds, freezing<br>> the video for an absolutely unbearable couple of seconds.<br>><br>> Take a look at the config values /proc/sys/vm/dirty*<br>> <br>> If I remember correctly, I just had to turn the centisecs down so it<br>> wouldn't wait so long to write out the cache. I'm sorry, power is out<br>> at my house or I could shell in and see the exact values I'm using - <br>> let me know if you're interested and I'll dig them up in a few hours.<br>><br>> Once you find values you like, you can put them in /etc/sysctl.conf.<br>><br>> Good luck,<br>> Mark<br><br>Ahh.. excellent advice and makes sense to what I am experiencing. <br>Currently my values look like this:<br>[mythtv@mythtv2 vm]$ more dirty_*<br>::::::::::::::<br>dirty_background_ratio<br>::::::::::::::<br>10<br>::::::::::::::<br>dirty_expire_centisecs<br>::::::::::::::<br>2999<br>:::::::::::::: <br>dirty_ratio<br>::::::::::::::<br>40<br>::::::::::::::<br>dirty_writeback_centisecs<br>::::::::::::::<br>499<br><br>I've never touched this stuff before. If you could take a peek at<br>yours are and post back, I would really appreciate it. </blockquote><div><br><br>I'm having the exact same problem. Everything works great as long as I'm not watching a show while it's recording. Live TV stutters as well as any thing listed in green in the library (signifying it's still recording that show). I can record 3 shows at once and watch a previously recorded one with out problems. <br><br>Where able to find the magic numbers here?<br></div></div></blockquote></div><br><div>Not yet. I cut my dirty_*_centisecs in half and I see it being a little better, but still not great. I'm a little afraid to play with the numbers too much since I don't know what side-effects they would have. I'm sure they were set to these for a reason. :)</div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div></body></html>