[mythtv] RedHat 8.0 and hardware questions.

[Henk Poley]

> Van: m0j0.j0j0 <m0j0@foofus.net>
>> On Tue, 2002-12-17 at 11:48, Robert Kulagowski wrote:
>>> 
>>> Live TV with Myth isn't really usable for me. Large pauses 
>>> every 5-10 seconds. I've cut the capture resolution to 480x240 and 
>>> still have the same problems. Nothing else is running at the time and
>>> the system load is usually 2-3.
>> 
>> Are you saying that the load is 2.00 or 0.02?  If your load is 2.00
>> then I think that's a clue to what your problem is...
> 
> Right, system load of about 2.00 for live-only TV. Not good...
> 
> During live-only TV, I have two main mythfrontend threads, one at about
> 50-60% CPU and the other between 30-40%. Nothing much else running on
> this box.
> 
> During playback-only of recorded shows, I have one thread between
> 20-40%. Percentages seem to bounce around a fair amount in 'top' for
> Myth.
> 
> Live TV is super jerky with pauses every 10-15 seconds. Playback of
> recorded shows is not as jerky, but still not right. I'm not sure if
> it's the playback that is giving me the problems or the original *.nuv
> files have issues and there's a problem in how my system is recording
> them. I will attempt to play one of them on a different host.
> 
> Someone asked about my mainboard... it's a Asus A7S333. The system has a
> AMD XP2100 and 256MB DDR PC2700. Should be quick enough. Also, running
> RedHat 7.3 w/2.4.20 and Gnome 2 (Ximian snaps).

Hmm, nope, can't see anything that would point to such a performance
degredation. Should be plenty enough. And the 2.4.20 kernel is the one that
fixes IDE CPU-time. Don't know about the chipset used, but there are just
only a few Asus boards that are not 'super duper'.

I guess you don't get kernel (HDD) errors?  (AFAIK, Mandrake 9 has them
'live' at console 10)

> I'm not sure why Myth is consuming so many resources. I thought it was
> disk issues at first, but now I'm clueless... I'll try and do some
> benchmarking (someone suggested using 'bonnie') to see if I have some
> hardware not performing up to spec. Any other thoughts?

One thing might be that you run you Athlon XP at 100MHz FSB, some
mainboards don't init/detect things right when you run it at that speed.
Set it at 133/266 and your memory at 166/333.

Don't know as how far Linux is affected by this. Under Windows, my XP2000+
(on a ECS K7S5A) performs much like an Athlon 1200 (..synthethic
bechmarks..) when you clock it down.

Have you compiled things for the Athlon (XP)?

	Henk Poley <><