[mythtv-users] optimizing speed/power consumption [was: slow startup, channel change]

[Matt Price]

THanks robert,

On Wed, 2006-01-04 at 21:29 -0600, Robert Johnston wrote:
> On 1/4/06, Matt Price <matt.price at utoronto.ca> wrote:
> >
> > I know this is a slow system, but I have a hauppauge pvr-350
> > installed, so most of the heavy lifting should be taken care of.  Are
> > there any tweaks I can apply to speed up the funcitoning of the gui?
> 
> The "Prescaling Images" IS what's done to speed up the GUI. If we
> didn't do that (And it's cached for following runs, so it shouldn't
> take near so long the second time) then we'd have to re-scale the
> images every time you change screen.
> 

I see.  As you suggested I built a slightly less complex theme.  Since I
know nothing about myth or xml, I just deleted al lthe "buttons" from
theme.xml in the default /GANT theme, which produced a noticable speedup
both in the initial startup and in the screen redraws when flipping
between options.  There's still a short delay between "rescaling images"
and the appearance of the main menu -- not sure what causes that, as
it's not reported in the onscreen messages.  But all in all this seems a
pretty good solution.  

> As the besic premise is that the Myth box is kept running 24/7, you
> should only have to see the "Prescaling Images" prompt once in a blue
> moon.
> 

eventuallyv I do want to go to 24/7 usage -- though I was htinkinga bout
giving the system a break a few hours a day to save electricity.
failing that, it would be nice to be able to greatly diminish power
consumption when system is idle by spinning down the drive, reducing cpu
activity, etc. Since my system is noisier than I'd like that'd have
multiple bonuses.  I figure this must be a trick other people have tried
-- what techniques do folks use?

> Another suggestion would be to make sure that the 350 is in the
> highest PCI slot you can, not a shared PCI/ISA slot, as that will
> enable the card to use "BusMastering", which will speed things up
> some. Also make sure you have enabled DMA transfers on your hard-drive
> with HDParm (If they're supported on your motherboard).
> 

DMA is on, but I will look in to the slot -- I think I may have the card
in the scond slot, not the first, and can easily change that.  

> Unfortunately, as it's only a PIII system you have, manipulating
> fullscreen graphics will be slow. The only thing I could recommend is
> to perhaps change the "rendering method", or build yourself a Theme
> that has only basic colours in (No fancy images to scale and resize =
> performance boost). That's about it, though. Sorry.
> --

thanks for hte hints.

matt


> Robert "Anaerin" Johnston
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