[mythtv-users] pdflush is killing me

[Mark Lehrer]

Hello there, I'm having a problem with frequent pauses and I'm wondering
if anyone here is familiar with pdflush and how to make it a little
less painful.

I use NFS for my storage, XFS file system.  The problem only seems to
happen when I am both recording and playing back a hi def stream at
the same time.  Every minute or so on the server, pdflush will wake up
and freeze all I/O for a couple of seconds.  The server is running
Ubuntu 6.06.1 LTS, with this kernel: 2.6.15-26-686 #1 SMP PREEMPT

Any idea how to fix the problem?  It is disturbing that the ring
buffer size doesn't seem to help at all - 90MB should be enough to
handle a 30 second I/O pause but the myth playback is pausing the
instant that pdflush wakes up on the server.  Is the ring buffer not
being filled in a separate thread?  Does MythTV have an option that
works the same way as mplayer's -cache option?  That seemed to always
work pretty well.

Thanks!
Mark