[mythtv-users] Hard Drive Performance

[Martin Bene]

> I've been using my machine for a while now, with only minor 
> problems, so I've been pretty much leaving it alone (Running 
> a cvs from Julyish).  

> Lately though, some of the little 
> things have been annoying me more, so I thought I'd ask to 
> see if anyone had suggestions.  The primary problems appears 
> to be my hard drives can't keep up.  

On top of what has already been suggested: what filesystem are you using
for your video device, and what state is that filesystem in wrt. to
fragmentation?

The normal usage pattern for the recording dirctory of a mythtv system
is quite close to a worst case scenario:

 - huge files
 - filesystem almost completely full all the time
 - lots of deletions / new files
 - especially bad if you've got several video cards and do concurrent
recordings.

My 1.4Tb video dir with xfs showed significantly degraded performance
after about 9 months; state of filesysem: ~800 files stored using more
than 1.5 million fragments, with a fragmentation factor of 99.97%. This
means that each file is on average distributed over almost 2000 seperate
locations on disk, which does NOT help performance AT ALL :-)

Looks like regular use of xfs_fsr is definitely necessary to keep the
system running smoothly.

Bye, Martin