Suddenly Sage is a turtle! What happened?

[silkshadow]

Not to disparage turtles , but all of a sudden Sage has started to crawl. Some background info: over a month and a half ago I returned from a trip to find my Sage server toasted. In the interim I put sage on my client and had it record from there. The client is not the best of machines:

AMD XP 2000+
512mb of ram (pc333)
fx5700 video
PVR-USB2 and PVR-250
Recording to a couple of ATA133 7200rpm drives (no raid).

Since I put Sage on there, its been running fine, I'm not using Sage service but rather sleeping Sage and its version 2.1. The box is up 24/7 with reboots once in a while and its on a UPS.

Yesterday, I went into the upcomming recordings screen and scrolled down. All of a sudden it froze and when I shook my mouse there was no pointer. However, when I pressed the windows key on my keyboard, the start menu jumped up and I could see my mouse pointer when I dragged it over the task bar and start menu. After a few minutes, Sage executed the last command I gave it. Then it froze again, another couple of minutes it executed the last command I gave it. Finally I gave up and rebooted.

This problem has not gone away over 24 hours and many reboots/tweaking (Norton disk doctor, reg cleaning, process viewer, etc) later. It seems Sage works fine unless I enter the favorites menu, the EPG, or look at scheduled recordings. Playback is randomly choppy but pressing pause and play stops the choppy playback till the next one occurs; and the actual mpegs play fine on another box in Zoom Player. No other progam on the box is having this problem. Meedio runs fine as does Firefox, J River Media Center, Zoom Player, Outlook, etc.

Its only going to be another few weeks till I finalize the parts for the new server and recieve them (I got the CM Stacker already, awsome case). So I really don't want to have to go through th hassle of reinstalling or upgrading Sage. Any suggestions to just keep this box functioning for another few weeks or any idea what the problem is? Nothing changed on the box between when Sage was working fine and yesterday when it became a turtle.

[Scriber]

Originally Posted by silkshadow

Yesterday, I went into the upcomming recordings screen and scrolled down. All of a sudden it froze and when I shook my mouse there was no pointer. However, when I pressed the windows key on my keyboard, the start menu jumped up and I could see my mouse pointer when I dragged it over the task bar and start menu. After a few minutes, Sage executed the last command I gave it. Then it froze again, another couple of minutes it executed the last command I gave it. Finally I gave up and rebooted.

Hmmmmm..... I just noticed that my Sage server started this EXACT behavior as well. To fix I simply restart Sage and its fine for awhile then the behavior starts.

What I've noticed other than the delayed response to menu commands (not quite as slow as yours but its seriously slow) and frozen pointer (yet XP and all other apps are fine) is that while hovering over my sage icon in the systray while sleeping the tool tip changed from the "SageTV" to "SageTV 2". What could that possibly indicate??? Sage’s CPU usage during delay is 0% and nothing else is using CPU.

The only thing I've messed with lately was removing the analog connection to the 150 and adding a STB, the digital channel lineup, an Svideo to the 150 from the STB, and starting to use the H blaster along with the H remote. The 350’s analog connection did not change.

Frankly, I haven’t done much troubleshooting nor have I tried undoing any of these changes.

I don't run Sage as a service either and my HW is quite different from yours (ATI IGP mobo, 2.4G Cel, 512MB, 350, 150, H remote/blaster), 4 HDDs.

I’ve not noticed any issues using Sage client when this delay occurs.

[Opus4]

I can only guess at a few things & would suggest asking tech support if someone else doesn't have better ideas...

Is there a corrupted recording or library file that it eventually sees & chokes on?

Is the wiz.bin file _huge_ suddenly? (By huge, I mean _much_ larger than 10 MB.)

How's your memory usage? Is there antivirus software that is automatically scanning the recorded files, sageTV dir, and/or library dirs and eating all the memory, causing things to get swapped out of memory?

Have you scanned your drives for possible bad sections?

Again: just guessing.

- Andy

[silkshadow]

Thanks Opus4! How do I find a corrupted recoding? I have alot of recordings, is there an easier way then trying to play each one? My wiz.bin is around 2 megs. Incidentally, I would love a way to clean it out as there are some things in there that need to go . After moving SageTV to the client I have killed all scheduled anti-virus scans and I told them to never scan Sage's folders.

Humm, memory useage is a good question. I don't see anything hogging up resources in Sandra or the task manager memory screen, how else can I tell? I hadn't considered a bad HD originally but, after reading your post, I ran Seagate's and Western Digital's diagnostic utilities on Sage's drives. It took all morning but they reported no problems.

Its quite perplexing though I have come up two possibilities:

@Scriber, has it suddenly gotten hotter where you live? Here is hot most of the year but we're in "summer" now and temps are in the 90's and its damn humid. I'm thinking temp might be a problem but I turned off the box last night and let it cool for 8+ hours. Still haveing the same prob today. I'm actually waiting for Sage to execute my next 4 commands as I type.

The other thing I was thinking is that it might be a drive space issue. I have had only ~10gigs left of recording space left for this past week. I've been barely keeping up with it by watching deleting a couple things as I can. This current setup is a hack job and I ran out of space quite quick. Maybe Sage is getting pissed that I'm not giving it enough space to work with LOL!

[Opus4]

I don't really know what else to say about the problem you are describing, except:

Originally Posted by silkshadow

How do I find a corrupted recoding? I have alot of recordings, is there an easier way then trying to play each one? My wiz.bin is around 2 megs.

Look for some 0 length recordings, to start with. Other then that... don't know what to say other then trying to play them. I would start with the most recent files. Oh: and your wiz.bin isn't too large.

Here's one thing to test: make a backup of all your data files & then clear out wiz.bin, the properties files, and all their backups. SageTV will restart w/o knowing where any recordings or library files are (unless they are in default locations). If it reacts to commands just fine, that may indicate a corrupt recording is the cause. Perhaps create a new temporary recording/lib dir & start moving groups of files into it. If SageTV starts choking on some group of files, you know the file is there.

Just don't forget to keep the backup of your original data files & make sure to put the recordings back in their original locations, or else you could end up losing your wiz.bin data.

Incidentally, I would love a way to clean it out as there are some things in there that need to go

You could use any STV that has malore's viewing history (malore, MalDude2, or Cayars; don't know about others). In the Viewing Hoistory, for any show that has no recoriding file still existing, you can clear the Watched & Don't Like status and it will eventually get kicked out of the database. (Probably after the next EPG update.)

- Andy

[silkshadow]

Thanks Opus4, that was a good test idea! I tried it and my menus worked normal speed till I accessed the EPG. Then everything went into molasas. I tried again taking out the epgdata file and everything worked smoothly. I kept the epg out and put wiz.bin back. I got slow menus again when I accessed favorites. So I tried again, this time I ran Sage vanilla and added a single timed recordning. After adding the recording, I went into upcomming recordings and everyhting went into turtle mode again. I went back to vanilla and left Sage alone for the night.

Today I went to the Sage box and it was crashed, totally frozen. I rebooted, ran norton on the disks and it found some minor errors. I rebooted and launched Sage and slowly started feeding it back the data again. Now its more like how Scriber described it, my menus are slow but tolerable. I have no idea what is going on however I can live with this till all my parts come in. Then I will put the new Sage version on and *hopefully* this will all go away like a bad dream. I am starting to suspect that this is hard drive related. I know the manufacturer's disk tests all came back negative but, and this could be my imagination, my OS drive (where sage is installed) seems to humm louder than before. After it finishes recording Survivor, I'm gona run the Western Digital disk test again. I report back it it finds anything but I don't think it will as its only been a day since I ran it last.

[PaulG]

How odd this is.....

I have the EXACT same problem since applying the latest round of Micor$oft security updates & I'm miffed about it (never mind the fact that I should know much much better)

by any chance has anyone else installed (or had them automagically installed) during the night ?????

Before I go back & deletes the system & reinstall from scratch does anyone have any ideas about the problem ???

[silkshadow]

Very possibly!! I have enabled automatic updates on this box as it used to be just a client. Are you running version 2.1 or 2.2 of Sage?

[PaulG]

I'm running v2.2

[silkshadow]

Wow, this is wierd! So we're running different versions of Sage and we have the same problem? Its hard to fathom. I checked and it seems automatic update didn't get any new updates last week for this box. Was there something in particular that you saw that linked the windows update to this problem? Any idea which update you think is the culprit? Let me also ask this, how many items do you have in your favorite list? I'm starting to suspect the menu delays might be due to the size of my favorites because I topped over the 100 item mark sometime before this problem occured. I am now at 112 items.

[Scriber]

I'm using 2.2 as well and my issue was prior to the recent Windows update.

Bad news: Since my post my box began a downward spiral. Other than the slow behavior mentioned, the next issue I started seeing was that the H blaster would not tune channels properly. Finally, things got so bad that when Sage would finally start playing a video (after the delay) Sage would crash (the Sage window would just disappear -- poof ). To fix, I could no longer restart Sage; I had to reboot then things were fine.

Good news: I found a simple workaround for now - turn-off standby on my server. Since doing so, for whatever reason, its working fine again. I still think this is somehow connected the H blaster. Unless purely coincidental, once I configured the remote to use it then enabled in Sage my problems began.

[silkshadow]

Humm, sounds like this problem is a common result of different problems. How wierd . I'm neither using an H Blaster nor am I putting the box into standby at all. I am currently at a status quo. My menus are still slow (but not as bad as in my first post) when i enter the screens I originally posted about. And once I enter those screens Sage as a whole slows down. If I do not enter those screens then I am golden. What I am doing is entering those screens only when I have to and rebooting the whole box afterwards. Its not pleasant but It'll do till my parts come in and I can redo the whole mess.

[Opus4]

Have you asked tech support about it? Maybe they would have an idea on how to track it down.

- Andy

[silkshadow]

I have solved my problem! It was a toughie since it is the combination of two things. The first is low disk space and the second is a large favorites list. I have 2 drives Sage is curently writing to. I discovered that when one of the drives had under 5gb and I try and add or edit a favorite, I get SageTurtle. I think this is because I have most of my favorites on manual deletion so when I changed my favorites with low disk space, SageTV was having a tough time recalculating everything it was going to record. Since I have been keeping my free space over 15gb, and I changed alot of my favs to auto deletion, I've have not had this problem again.

[Opus4]

If that situation is reproducible, you should probably send a note about it to tech support... unless you already have.

- Andy

[Lucas]

I have seen similar issues with SageTV "slowing down" lately. I am attributing to OS Page Swapping.

With SageTV 2.0 around October, my RAM usage was around 240Mb peaking to around 320Mb. I have 512.Mb.

These days with 2.2.7 and several WinXP updates etc... memory usage is up above 420Mb with SageTV idle. I have seen it go up higher into the 500s when play video's so at that time or when closing a file etc, the disks go crazy meaning the a lot of swaping takes place.

I am upgrading the memory to avoid this.

[AndyS]

I've had similar problems for some time, and it seems directly related to the amount of free-space on the data drives. On my client machines I get menu-molasses until I free space, and then things seem to get better. For some reason allocated memory seems to increase when there is little free-space.

Andy.

[silkshadow]

I think you are right AndyS. In using my current setup and slowly moving favorites back to manual deletion, it seems the threshold is around 5gb per drive. Thats the thing that was throwing me off is that sometimes I got SageTurtle when I had 15+gb free. However, I discovered that, usually, one drive had under 5gb free.

I am not certain because I can't seem to force SageTurtle to come on and I can't seem to force it away. When it starts happening, I'll delete a bunch of recordings to make over 5gb free on the drive, but the slow down won't stop. I will reboot and it will still be there. However, if I leave it alone for a couple hours, its fine. I definately think it has something to do with drive space but don't have a perfect fix. Anyway, I should be able to kiss this problem goodbye soon. My parts are starting to come in and Sage (assuming I can get a HTPC client to run SageTV correctly) will evetually have over a terebyte to itself.