[mythtv-users] System hangs occasionally

[MythTV MythTV]

On Tuesday, November 11, 2014, Dick Steffens <dick at dicksteffens.com> wrote:

>  On 11/11/2014 07:54 AM, MythTV MythTV wrote:
>
>
>
> There is only one hard drive in the box, and only room for one, so the
> swap partition is on that drive.
>
> Thanks for the tips
>

One other thought:

 Recent Linux kernels are using all available free memory for disk
caching.  So if you install X amount of memory into your Linux box, Linux
will silently use all available memory to cache disk files.  Opening those
same files later will be faster because parts of those files will be
resident in memory and Linux won't have to fetch them from disk.

What I am currently unsure about is how great this Linux feature is when
used with Mythtv, especially while recording one program while watching
another program at the same time.

To tell Linux not to disk cache as much you can tune the snappiness value
in your Linux kernel, see this link.

http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/88693/why-is-swappiness-set-to-60-by-default


If you are running the 64bit Linux and Mythtv binaries for MythTv then you
might want to consider more memory.

Lastly consider that some of your installed Linux binaries could have
memory leaks.  Boot your Linux system and look at the resident memory size
of each running process and then when the box hangs (or is close to
hanging) recheck those sizes and compare.

Hope that helps.
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