[mythtv-users] Re: mythtv-users Digest, Vol 30, Issue 28

[Steve Pugh]

Anthony wrote:

way to check which tuner recorded what program?  Could my problem be
> memory-related?  I have 512MB in the machine, and it seems to run fairly
> 'full' - I've seen it at 1% or 2% free when a lot was going on.
  

Hi Steve,

Sorry to hear about your problems.  512MB should be plenty.  I'm
running a similar setup (Athlon XP 2500+, 512 MB, 1x350, 1x250,
NForce2, etc) and when both tuners are running, I have no problems at
all.

When you say 1% or 2% free, how are you checking this?  If you run
"free -m" at the command line, it'll give you a breakdown of your
memory usage.  The first line might make things look pretty occupied,
but you'll probably notice that a good deal of your space is occupied
by the disk cache.  The second line is the interesting one, showing
the "used" and "free" memory when the disk cache is removed from the
numbers.  When my machine (frontend + backend combined) is recording
on both tuners, (and watching a recording, and serving an mp3 to me
here at work, transcoding through lame...) I'm only seeing ~16% CPU
usage, and the memory used is 271 MB (231 MB free).

Could the problem be your hard drives?  DMA is enabled?

Cheers,
Anthony.
  

Thank you for the reply, Anthony - you're right, I was looking at the 
memory usage from "top", which included disk cache.  Checking with 
"free" shows much less occupied.   DMA *is* enabled on my drive (200GB), 
although having said that I can note that on the day the meltdown 
occurred, it was more full than it had ever been before (thank you, Sci 
Fi channel).  Not sure if that could have anything to do with it.

I rolled back to ivtv-0.2.0-rc3k and was able to record successfully 
yesterday - unfortunately, I'm seeing the same black screen on playback 
that prompted me to upgrade to 0.3.6g when I first built the machine.  
Sooo, sounds like it might be more a problem for the ivtv list after 
all.  I just hate the seeming randomness of it all, makes me worry about 
what would happen if I went out of town and it broke.

Best,
    Steve