[mythtv-users] Dual Card CPU experience

Brian Foddy bfoddy at visi.com
Fri Apr 25 04:50:03 UTC 2003


On Thursday 24 April 2003 08:40 pm, Michael D. Cencula wrote:
>
> I'm using two Hauppage 401s on an Athlon 2100 with a single WD 200GB drive.
> It can simultaneously encode two 480x480 RTJPEG at quality 170 streams and
> play another nearly flawlessly.  Dunno about cpu usage, though.
>

It would be great if you could watch a top session for a few minutes while
doing this.

> The only problems I've noticed are:
> 1. When the second stream starts encoding after the first stream has been
> encoding for a while, it will cause the the first stream to run in slow
> motion (missing a bunch of frames) for about 1-2 seconds.  Audio is fine
> during this glitch.  Once the second stream gets going, everything runs
> great with no glitches.
> 2. I have a purge script that runs via cron every half hour.  It checks
> whether the hard drive is nearing full capacity.  If it is, it
> automatically deletes the oldest file.  This can cause the same effect
> mentioned above for 1-2 seconds.

Sounds like you are perhaps running out of IO capacity, and any cache
disruption puts the machine over the edge.  As a small suggestion, you
might nice down your cron job, it might slow down the surge just enough.

Thanks for you feedback, and if you get some cpu numbers please post them.

Brian





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