Delete File Taking A Long Time

[aperry]

I'm having a problem when deleting files in SageTV. It is taking about 5 seconds to delete the file. It used to be instantaneous.

I thought it may have something to do with my disk getting too fragmented, but the slow deletes happen even with XVID AVI files which are on a drive that is not fragmented. Plus, those are very small files, so they shouldn't be taking that long.

Also, deleting files outside of SageTV is instantaneous.

I'm wondering if there may be a problem with one of the internal SageTV files. Maybe they've gotten too big or something?

I checked the Task Manager, and SageTV is using about 150 MB of memory. Is that too high?

[aperry]

Well, I guess I'm talking to myself here ...

Anyhow, to follow up, I did manage to get things back to normal by doing a semi-defrag on my recording drives. I have two 200 GB drives set up for recordings. Since defragging takes forever, I have come up with an alternate approach (my drives are E: and F: ). Here are the steps, and I have included some of the XCOPY commands in case anyone's interested.

1. Exit sage (and service if necessary)
2. Copy everything from F:\ to E:\backup\ (xcopy /e/v F:\*.* E:\backup\)
3. Delete everything from F:\
4. Copy everything back from E:\backup\ to F:\ (xcopy /e/v E:\backup\*.* F:\)
5. Delete everything in the E:\backup\ folder
6. Copy everything from E:\ to F:\backup\
7. Delete everything from E:\
8. Copy everything back from F:\backup\ to E:\
9. Delete everything in the F:\backup\ folder

After this is done, all my files are unfragmented. And it takes about 1/10th the time of a true defragment. I do not run this using a batch file as I want to makes sure every step completes successfully.

I'm still not sure why fragmentation of my recording drives was making the XVID AVI files delete slow since they are all on separate drives, but whatever, things seem to be okay now.

[mike1961]

On your drive F, did you format it to 64K clusters as recommended to reduce fragmentation? Also, is there plenty of available space and are you only using that drive for sage recordings?

Mike

[aperry]

Yes, both E: and F: are formatted with 64K clusters, only about 40GB in use on each drive (I delete files myself as soon as they are watched), and other than holding a backup of Sage configuration files on one of them, they are exclusively used for recordings.

Doesn't matter though, you record one program, and if you were to analyze the drive, it would tell you it needs defragmenting. Understandably, the fragmentation is worse if you have more than one recording going at a time.

The procedure I outlined was one I did a while back semi-regularly, not really out of need, just something I thought was a good idea from time to time. I had not done this for several months when I started noticing the slow deletes.

Anyhow, the problem seems resolved for now, so I'll just continue this effort as it crops up.