[mythtv-users] : Is it worth while to stop/start mythtv nightly?)

[David Asher]

On Nov 8, 2010, at 5:17 AM, George Poulson wrote:

> On 8 November 2010 10:06, James Thorpe <james at pawsforthorpe.co.uk> wrote:
>  
> Current top view, pretty similar other than swap size - could that be an issue?:
> 
> 
> I don't imagine so .. especially since none of it is in use :-)
> 
> I just realised I took my snapshot without the frontend running :-s .. but the difference /with/ it running is hardly significant..
> 
> top - 10:12:59 up 6 days, 22:07,  2 users,  load average: 0.15, 0.35, 0.34
> Tasks: 176 total,   1 running, 175 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
> Cpu(s):  0.8%us,  0.2%sy,  0.0%ni, 99.0%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
> Mem:   1543512k total,  1116248k used,   427264k free,   183676k buffers
> Swap:  5278712k total,        0k used,  5278712k free,   635788k cached
> 
> As you say.. get another snapshot from 'top' when it slows right down .. hopefully that may reveal something.

I have a nearly identical setup hardware-wise, but I'm running Mythbuntu 9.04 using PXE boot and no swap.  I've had to have a cron.daily job kill my frontend every day @ 4am (it auto restarts via a script upon exiting).  If I don't do this mythfrontend's virtual size grows too large to spawn the gnome-screensaver --poke command and eventually the screen goes blank and stays blank.  I'm running mostly up-to-date 23-fixes with the Mythbuntu theme.

I've been waiting to debug why the virtual size seems to keep growing until I get to a more modern distro.  Some days where the family does a larger than usual amount of TV viewing it will grow too large before we go to bed -- requiring that I kill it manually or lose the screen.  So it definitely has something to do with watching of videos/recordings.

I could probably solve the problem by adding an NFS swapfile, but I was hoping not to need to.

David.