[mythtv-users] Disk space is not freed from deleted recording until mythbackend exits

[chris at cpr.homelinux.net]

On Fri, Aug 18, 2006 at 09:20:11PM -0500, Brian Foddy wrote:
> I'm glad to read from the ticket there is an OFF switch to this.
> I must say I delete with frequent regularity files 7-15+GB on
> XFS and it never takes more than a couple seconds and
> I've never seen it interfere with recording threads.  Something
> as slow as described above, 16 hours to delete 500MB...  Not
> very useful when my system can write 30GB or more per hour of new
> recordings (3 HD tuners and 3 SD tuners if they are all running).

My first thought was something similar - we are constantly told 
that a "properly running" Myth system will eventually have a 
completely full hard drive and will expire old shows (and live TV) 
to record new.  I suppose this "slow delete" silliness will result 
in lost recordings because the system hasn't finished deleting 
files you watched three days ago and therefore doesn't have any 
room for new ones....

Where did this insane idea come from, anyway?  Every time we 
complain about scheduling problems we are told to buy another 
tuner.  Whenever we object to the way Myth expires files we are 
told to buy larger hard drives.  To my way of thinking, if someone 
is finding that deleting a file is such a huge task that it's 
killing recordings then maybe they should be told to (1) get a 
faster computer, (2) stop using the notoriously slow ext 
filesystem, and/or (3) disable commercial flagging.

Even if someone was stuck on ext3, the system should still be able 
to delete files AT LEAST as fast as it creates them.  If not, then 
the whole idea of recording live TV in separate files should be 
scrapped and we should switch to using a permanent fixed-length 
ring-buffer so that the size of the file never changes and live TV 
never needs to be deleted.