[mythtv] performance

Neil Trodden mythtv-dev@snowman.net
Sat, 14 Dec 2002 00:06:14 +0000


At 15:20 13/12/2002 -0800, you wrote:

>I noticed that watching live TV uses 95-100% CPU time using mpeg4 encoding 
>at 640 X 480.  My system is an Athlon XP 1800 with 256M PC 2100 
>ram.  Running hdparm tells me that my hard drive throughput is about 23 Mb 
>/ sec.  Is this performance about what I should expect?  If so, what would 
>be the best way to increase performance, more memory, faster processor or 
>faster hard drive?
>
>
>
>Thanks.

Judging by what others have said (I seem to remember a system with an 
XP2000 getting about 50%-ish CPU usage), you should be able to get better 
performance. Without knowing what type of HD you have, it's difficult to 
say whether 23MB/sec is good but if it's a fairly recent drive (as your 
MBoard and CPU are) you probably should get better. I wonder if you have 
DMA enabled on the drives, that might explain the high CPU usage if you 
don't because the CPU would have to do all the work... If not that, I'd 
guess your CPU is getting tied up with some sort of bottleneck and it's 
probably not the mpeg4 codec..


--

Neil Trodden