[mythtv-users] Dual Core or Dual CPU??

Kevin Hulse jedi at mishnet.org
Sat Aug 4 18:51:39 UTC 2007


On Sat, Aug 04, 2007 at 07:51:21AM -0600, Brian Wood wrote:
> On Saturday 04 August 2007 07:29, GyroTech wrote:
> > Hello all - I'm looking for some hardware advice for a MythTV server I
> > want to build.
> >
> > I'm looking to kit out a fairly beefy back-end, dealing with MythTV and
> > a file server. It's going to have a PCI-E RAID5 card in it (RocketRAID
> > seems to be a good choice there)and two, perhaps four, DVB-T tuner cards
> > in it. All the front ends will be FE-only boxes, maybe even diskless.
> >
> > I was looking at forking out for a dual Opteron setup, but since these
> > Core 2 Duos have come out they seem to be able to handle a fair grunt.
> > So, has anyone worked with either\both setups care to give me an honest
> > opinion on what they would do. Obviously the Intel chips and lower power
> > and price on their side, but Opterons have the increased bus bandwidth
> > (which helps greatly in the transcoding) and redundancy on their side.
> 
> I think just about any reasonably modern machine will do fine for you. A 
> backend really doesn't have much of a CPU requirement in normal DVR 
> operation, disk I/O being more important. CPU is required for commercial 
> flagging, transcoding and DVD creation, but all those procesess can be niced 
> as required, real time not being a factor.

	Something else to consider is the fact that transcoding can be 
distributed. It doesn't have to be going on on your backend. It can be
distributed to your frontends or any other Linux box running one the
local network.

[deletia]

	When I get around to gettting a dedicated desktop system again,
it will run slave backends for that very purpose. While you can certainly
nice your commflagging and transcoding jobs, you do want them to complete
in a timely manner since your effective storage will be impacted by your
ability to compress your recordings.

	All of that video compression will also mean that your are pushing
around smaller files (iow less IO) when it gets time to watch something &
really want good responsiveness.


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