[mythtv-users] Samba causing Mythtv Problems

Yan-Fa Li yanfali at best.com
Fri Oct 1 21:16:08 EDT 2004


Hi Muddy,

Just a simple observation.  Your computer is pretty old.  A Dual 
P2 at 300MHz might have been a trick piece of hardware about 6 years ago, 
but now it's pretty much a relic and it doesn't even run Linux 2.4 very 
well.  I know I have a P2 at 350 doing firewall duty.  I'm guessing it's 
probably running a particularly crappy Intel chipset known as the 440GX 
which at the time was cutting edge, but has a lot of legacy PCI 
problems.  Remember PCI is up to 2.3 spec now and your old box is 
probably 2.0 if you're lucky.  There were a lot of problems with 
interactions between ISA and PCI slots back in the day that were only 
solved around the 2.1 time frame.

While the actual CPU of the system may not be getting much of a workout,
I bet the PCI bus is, first transferring all that data around and 
secondly by running your hard disks at UDMA 33 at best.  Try this test 
for me:

hdparm -tT /dev/hda

Are the numbers any good ?  Above 16MB/s ?  Probably saturates the 
system bus when it does that too.  Remeber at UDMA33 your box is using 
the bus 3 times longer than UDMA100 to transfer the same data.  That can 
be significant.

Dual processors only makes the whole situation worse, since the P2 
wasn't particularly good at SMP and especially not on that chipset.  I 
have an old Dual PPro 333MHz and it's a dog so I know what I speak of.

You would probably be better served by dropping $150 on a used P3 at 800MHz 
running a solid chipset like the 440BX rather than trying to make that 
particular dog hunt.

Just my 0.02c

Yan

btw, how long did it take you to compile mythtv on that box precisely ? 
  All night ?  And I don't even want to know how long it took you to 
install an OS :D


More information about the mythtv-users mailing list