[mythtv-users] frontend responsiveness on iscsi

[Fred Watt]

On 23/10/13 19:55, Joseph Fry wrote:
> I am running a diskless frontend via iSCSI (added GPXE to boot rom)
> and it has served me well for well over a year.
>
> My only complaint is that things like artwork and channel icons seem
> to take much (.25 - .5 sec) longer to load than they do on my
> MBE/FE... its tolerable, but annoying because I know how fast it
> could/should be.  I am not sure it's iSCSI necessarily, it may just be
> the difference between a f dedicated frontend and a BE/FE combo.
>
> I may just put the frontend on a USB stick, but before I did that, I
> was wondering if there is any other way to make things respond a bit
> faster.  Prehaps moving a cache to a ramdisk (I could spare 500 MB of
> ram for it), or adjusting a setting to use memory instead of disk
> cache, or something like that.
>
> At some point I'll move that frontend over to a USB stick, or a cheap
> SSD.  It's my primary use frontend, and it needs to be silent (which
> is why I went diskless to begin with).
>
> Any suggestions would be appreciated.
> _______________________________________________
> mythtv-users mailing list
> mythtv-users at mythtv.org
> http://www.mythtv.org/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
Hiya - I've also been running a slave/fe like this for over 4 years.  
For me it's fast enough, but waiting for ubuntu to boot is sometimes a 
bit slow. But's that's iscsi.  Starting mythfrontend is fine as it auto 
starts, and the delay is the OS load.

I assume your running everything over a GB network that makes a big 
difference. 100Mbs iscsi is a tad slow.  If you're going to boot from 
usb stick - then I'm assuming USB 3 otherwise I can't imagine being that 
much faster.

Next time I refresh my h/w I'll move from iscsi back to a ssd a small 
mSATA.  Fast boots are preferable when my partner sat in front of the 
TV.  Then again alot of modern TVs provide great dlna playbacks from 
nas', servers and I do wonder if I need a frontend on the TVs anymore.  
We've kind of stopped using mythfrontend for playback and stream over 
twonky from our master backend to a sony tv, my slave syncs after it has 
finished recording.

Given that they are not too expensive, if you want a springy launch, I'd 
just buy a SDD now.  Save you a lot of time.  I've use one is for my 
server for my iscsi disk paritions, it works well but does not deliver 
desktop performance as it's iscsi over Gigabit.

Go on buy yourself that ssd.


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.mythtv.org/pipermail/mythtv-users/attachments/20131023/c704117e/attachment.html>