[mythtv-users] Western Digital Red for Myth

[Simon Hobson]

"Mike Carron" wrote:
>What do you consider a fast CPU? My BE is currently running on a Core i7 930
>with 12gb of RAM and it finishes the flagging of a 3 hour show about 2 hours
>after the show is finished.

It's all relative - depends not only on "speed" but also memory and other activity.
Basically, if the process can complete before the buffered data gets flushed from RAM then it'll use the in-memory copy and not hit disk again. So if your system has enough RAM to hold at least all of the show that hasn't been flagged yet (in your example, that's about 40% of the recording), and you don't do anything else, then it'll run from RAM..

On the other hand, with less RAM and/or a busier system - other recordings or playbacks could have caused your unflagged recording to get flushed - once that happens, the recordng will need to be read back in again as the commflag progresses.

So like most aspects of BE performance - what is "fast" or "acceptable" depends very much on your usage. HD needs more space than SD, multiple tuners/parallel recordings need more space than a single tuner, and so on.

If that 12G of RAM is just for the Myth system then I'd expect that commflagging to work mostly from cache unless you are recording multiple HD programs at once.