[mythtv-users] Draft revisions to HowTo section 3.3, second try

[Isaac Richards]

On Wednesday 23 April 2003 07:57 pm, Ray Olszewski wrote:
> First, I would restore the comment I made about swap partitions being
> useless for MythTV. Of course, this is just my opinion, and you might not
> share it.

The linux kernel is tuned to run better with, if not essentially require, some 
swap space.

> Second, I would restore the comment I made that additional RAM (over 256
> MB) acts to buffer writes to the hard disk. This role of "spare" RAM is
> commonly overlooked, and people should be more aware of it. On any system
> that runs a real-time, use-it-or-lose-it activity like video capture, the
> extra time buffering buys can help the system cope with transient encoding
> loads (camera pans seems now to be everyone's main example of this, for
> good reason).

MythTV syncs all writes to disk approximately once a second.  Otherwise, the 
kernel will buffer lots of data, then decide to write out _lots_ of it at 
once, basically killing performance and causing frames to be dropped.

Isaac