[mythtv-users] Waking up MythTV

[Eloy Paris]

On Thu, Feb 04, 2010 at 10:01:37AM +0000, Paul Clark wrote:

> > Whenever I first use the remote after any long time of inactivity, it
> > takes a long time to wake up.
>
> I've noticed the same as well since I upgraded to 9.10/0.22-fixes.  On my
> old 8.04/0.21-fixes system there wasn't a noticeable wake up time but now
> there is.  I'm assuming it's down to the frontend being paged out to disk as
> it's inactive.  When I use my system after a long period of inactivity I
> hear a lot of disk noise and then everything's fine.

Sorry guys, but another "me too" report. I also noticed the problem
after migrating from 0.21 to 0.22. For me the problem happens when
the frontend machine resumes after being suspended (to RAM) for a few
hours. I believe this does not happen when the frontend is left on.

I think the problem is related to TCP connections between the frontend
and the backend and database dying. My guess is the database connection
because currently MythTV does not seem to implement TCP keepalives so
the connection stays up forever. For instance, these two backends have
been suspended to RAM for several hours (in one case overnight) and
their TCP connection to the backend is still alive:

backend$ netstat -an | egrep '(11\.10)|(13\.200)'
tcp        0      0 10.10.13.10:6543        10.10.13.200:45263  ESTABLISHED
tcp        0      0 10.10.13.10:6543        10.10.11.10:34007   ESTABLISHED

http://svn.mythtv.org/trac/ticket/7839 has just been fixed to add TCP
keepalive support so I think I won't see the above behavior with regards
to TCP connections surviving extended suspends after I start running a
version with the fix for this bug.

So, my guess is that the database connection is going away during a
suspend, but I don't know if that is the cause for the 2 or 3 second
pauses after entering a menu for the first time after an extended
suspend. I'll try to do a packet capture to get a better idea of what is
happening.

In the mean time I just told my wife to wait a few seconds for the UI to
become responsive after coming back from a suspend.

Cheers,

Eloy Paris.-