[mythtv-users] mythbackend Crashing

[Derek Battams]

5 day old 0.18 install on FC3 using Axel's RPMs (as described in Jarod's guide).

* Celeron 2.6Ghz CPU, 512MB RAM
* 160GB IDE drive
* GeForce FX 5200 for TV-Out
* Single PVR-250 card for capturing

The mythbackend process seems to be dying randomly and quite often.  The last
couple of days it seemed to always die right after the scheduled filldatabase
job in the middle of the night.  But then tonight it died 10 seconds after
starting a scheduled recording - the first time the backend has died during
recording/playback.  The system is not locking up/freezing and other than the
mythbackend process dying, it is fully functional.

The backend log is not giving any hints as to the problem nor is there anything
in /var/log/messages.  I even raised the logging in mythbackend to 'all' and
it's not logging anything about the reason for the sudden stop.  Once I restart
the backend everything works as expected - until the next time it dies.

I'm unable to reproduce the dying backend process - for example, the last two
nights it died right after the mythfilldatabase job so today I manually ran
mythfilldatabase to see if I could reproduce the crash, but no luck.

I'm now running the restartd daemon to monitor the backend process and though
this would work for restarting the backend when it dies, it hardly seems like
the ideal solution.  But since there's no indication from any logs as to the
cause, I'm now looking for suggestions as to how I might be able to go about
debugging these apparent random crashes of the backend?  My latest guess was
possible overheating, but heating does not appear to be an issue at all, as I
expected.

Help appreciated,

Derek