[mythtv-users] Pausing issues

[Curtis]

> 2012/11/30 Robert Dege <livemotion at gmail.com>:
>> Whenever I watch LiveTV, or watch a recording in progress, about 85% of the
>> time, the playback will pause for about half a sec, and then resume.
>> There's no notification on the screen, or any picture distortion.  This
>> pause occurs every 5 to 7 seconds.  At first, I thought that the mythbox was
>> being overloaded (I have an HD Prime that can record up to 3 channels at
>> once onto two physical hard drives).  However, I noticed that I can watch an
>> old show with no interruptions while all 3 tuners are active.  I also
>> discovered that the pausing issue occur even if only one tuner is active,
>> and I'm watching that recording in progress.
>>
>> I'm not exactly sure how I should go about troubleshooting this problem, so
>> any suggestions are appreciated.

I recently experienced a very similar issue, and running iotop on the 
backend showed that during the playback pauses was high IO by the 
process "[jbd2/sdb1-8]".  This is the journaling block device for my 
ext4 root filesystem.  Setting the "noatime" mount option on the root 
filesystem appears to have resolved the problem.  Since my recordings 
are written to a different filesystem, I suspect this was related to 
mysql activity.

Good luck,

Curtis