<div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr">Here is the swap screen. Seems to change every half minute or so.</div><div dir="ltr"><br><div><br></div><div><div>top - 07:43:04 up 1 day, 13:06, 2 users, load average: 1.17, 0.98, 0.78</div><div>Tasks: 178 total, 2 running, 176 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie</div><div>%Cpu(s): 4.4 us, 3.1 sy, 45.8 ni, 42.4 id, 4.1 wa, 0.0 hi, 0.3 si, 0.0 st</div><div>KiB Mem : 2061948 total, 135672 free, 450240 used, 1476036 buff/cache</div><div>KiB Swap: 2094076 total, 1704088 free, 389988 used. 1349872 avail Mem</div><div><br></div><div> PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND SWAP</div><div> 1463 dad 20 0 797276 202396 70308 S 6.0 9.8 62:25.69 <a href="http://mythfrontend.re">mythfrontend.re</a> 112496</div><div> 877 mysql 20 0 591676 112716 7852 S 0.3 5.5 4:02.20 mysqld 79360</div><div> 1417 dad 20 0 190808 3524 3228 S 0.0 0.2 0:04.19 xfdesktop 45392</div><div> 866 mythtv 20 0 694168 39028 8264 S 6.6 1.9 68:35.58 mythbackend 30564</div><div> 959 root 20 0 1720888 18912 13756 S 1.7 0.9 4:08.08 Xorg 21792</div><div> 1471 dad 20 0 119084 4728 3848 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.28 nm-applet 5016</div><div> 782 root 20 0 90816 2952 2100 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.55 NetworkManager 4868</div><div> 670 root 20 0 38488 2088 1688 S 0.0 0.1 0:02.55 accounts-daemon 4440</div><div> 1655 dad 20 0 63016 3380 2936 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.11 notify-osd 4344</div><div> 1366 dad 20 0 43648 2924 2668 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.06 xfce4-session 2960</div><div> 691 root 20 0 859748 1216 452 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.56 snapd 2828</div></div><div><br></div></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr">On Thu, Oct 18, 2018 at 1:55 AM Stephen Worthington <<a href="mailto:stephen_agent@jsw.gen.nz">stephen_agent@jsw.gen.nz</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">On Wed, 17 Oct 2018 20:03:11 -0700, you wrote:<br>
<br>
>OK, well I have 2G of memory. That might be a problem then. I ordered a<br>
>new 1T HD and was going to put the new system on there from scratch. One<br>
>issue is that the 750G drive I am using is old as well so I was thinking a<br>
>new one might be a good idea. Not sure what I was going to do with the old<br>
>recordings... The main goal is to get a system that works.<br>
><br>
>Allen<br>
<br>
>From looking at what the RAM usage is on my mother's box (which has<br>
only 4 Gibytes of RAM), I think that 2 Gibytes of RAM is OK for<br>
mythbackend. Mythfrontend uses more than mythbackend, and it<br>
increases as the number of recordings grows, so it will probably be OK<br>
for a while, but you are likely to get some swapping. Adding in other<br>
large memory users such as Firefox or Thunderbird really will cause<br>
big problems - you will likely get thrashing of the swapper - and that<br>
will certainly damage or kill recordings.<br>
<br>
So I think you need to try running a recording with mythfrontend shut<br>
down, to see if the problem is too much swapping going on. And run<br>
top or htop to see the resource usage. If the recordings do work<br>
without glitches, then try with mythfrontend running. Play a<br>
recording, so it will have used a lot of RAM to do that, then Alt-Tab<br>
back to a command prompt again to check the swap use. And see if<br>
recordings are getting glitched again.<br>
<br>
To see the swap usage in top (which should already be installed), run<br>
it from the command line. Do f (to see the field management screen),<br>
scroll down to the "SWAP" line, hit space (to turn on display of the<br>
swap field) then s to sort by swap size, then escape go back to the<br>
main screen. The swap usage should be a column at the far right. Use<br>
q to quit out of top, and h for help.<br>
<br>
The problem with swap usage is not data that is swapped out because it<br>
is not being used - that does no damage as it simply gets swapped out<br>
once and causes no further problems. There is quite a bit of code and<br>
data like that in mythfrontend and mythbackend - everything that is<br>
only used at startup or is used for a feature you are not using (eg<br>
PCIe or USB tuners). But at some point there gets to be something<br>
that needs to be swapped in, but there is nothing in RAM that is not<br>
going to be used again. So making room to swap something in will push<br>
out something that will need to be swapped in again later. If there<br>
is too much of that going on, then things will be swapped in too late<br>
to do something critical and a recording will be damaged. This is<br>
called "thrashing". It can get so bad that attempting to kill<br>
everything and shut down will go so slowly it will take hours to<br>
happen. The only good solution if that is happening is to get more<br>
RAM.<br>
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</blockquote></div>