[mythtv-users] High CPU / Lockups. Diagnosis?

Chris Strom mythtv at eeeCooks.com
Sun Oct 10 18:30:23 UTC 2004


On Sat, Oct 09, 2004 at 07:00:08AM -0600, mark wrote:
> Also, I am running NVidia 6111 and no XvMC ( I dont think )
> 
> Here is a top from the machine just watching live TV.  I dont see which 
> process is causing the load.
> The load is 1.37 and the main CPU user is X but that is even low.
> Very strange:
> 
> top - 06:54:06 up 12:28,  4 users,  load average: 1.37, 0.77, 0.69
> Tasks:  96 total,   2 running,  94 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
> Cpu(s): 13.0% us,  4.7% sy,  0.3% ni, 80.7% id,  1.3% wa,  0.0% hi,  
> 0.0% si

I think you need to look for another culprit besides the CPU.  You're only
at 19.3% usage (80.7% id).  Load averages well above 1.0 are not
problematic under 2.6 kernels.  Also top does not properly calculate cpu usage
information for mythbackend (because it's threaded?).

But as long as the user and system usages do not get near 100%, your CPU
is not struggling.

Right now on my athlon 2600, I'm recording @704x480 on my hauppauge 878
(software encoding), recording with my PVR-250, and watching the video
from the first source.  My load average ranges between 3.5 and 5.0
according to top, but the user CPU% hovers around 80%.

<snip>

> >When I got up this am, the load was 1.71, mythbackend was taking 42% 
> >of the CPU and the frontend was frozen.
> >I restarted the backend and that reduced the load but did not free the 
> >frontend.  I had to kill mythfrontend and restart it.
> >I am seeing no log message errors in var/log/mythtv/*

Why do you think the problem is with the backend?  No errors in the log,
but the frontend is frozen - seems like there's a problem with the
frontend.  What was it doing when you left it in the pm?  The next time
this occurs, why not kill the frontend, start it up and see if it comes
back up OK?

Not really sure what the problem could be, but I tend to doubt the problem
is with the commercial detection...

-Chris

> >I have seen allot of people saying there are problems with commercial 
> >detection/highload/crashing. Could this be it?
> >
> >What can I try to fix this? It only ran for 12 hours before crashing.
> >Do I need to use some different version numbers of some packages?



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