Slow startup

[coppit]

Why does Sage take so long to start? What is the profiler anyway?

[domc]

I noticed happening in the beta 6 version. I think it has something to do with the sagetvservice running in the backround. Do you have that turned on?

[Opus4]

It doesn't really matter whether you are using service mode or not; it has to go through the same startup procedures at some point. Startup with a larger wiz.bin will take longer than with a fresh/smaller wiz.bin because it has to check & process things in the database. The more viewing history (and probably imported media) there is to check & the slower the computer, the longer it takes.

If using service mode, that startup is handled by the service, so once the service is fully running, the UI portion would load faster than if only the UI was used w/o the service.

(One thing about v6 is that during the very first startup, it has to reprocess a lot of the data in the database to allow for new capabilities, but this is a one-time thing.)

- Andy

[coppit]

Still, with a > 1GHz machine, initializing the profiler takes several minutes. It's always been this way for me, since 4.x days. It's not like Sage is untangling proteins or anything... What is it doing that chomps my CPU for that long?

[coppit]

Originally Posted by Opus4

The more viewing history (and probably imported media) there is to check & the slower the computer, the longer it takes.

Can't the imported media stuff be done in the background after Sage starts? Is viewing history from 2 years ago still relevant today? What computation is being done with the viewing history, exactly? If it really is CPU-intensive, why can't Sage save its state from the previous execution and simply pick up from where it left off?

I admit that I'm ignorant about what Sage is doing during startup, but I really don't see how an application like Sage can need that much CPU.

[blade]

Originally Posted by coppit

Is viewing history from 2 years ago still relevant today? What computation is being done with the viewing history, exactly?

Yes it is releveant. How do you think Sage knows not to schedule a show to record that you watched 2 years ago if it doesn't check the history?

[coppit]

Originally Posted by blade

Yes it is relevant. How do you think Sage knows not to schedule a show to record that you watched 2 years ago if it doesn't check the history?

Understood. Still, let's say that I've watch 2 million shows. Dealing with even that much data is trivial with today's computers. For example, I just corrected your misspelling of "relevant" above, and Firefox was able to nearly instantly search its entire corpus of known words to determine that my change was correct.

Something else must be the cause of the slow startup...

[Ken C]

Originally Posted by Opus4

It doesn't really matter whether you are using service mode or not; it has to go through the same startup procedures at some point. Startup with a larger wiz.bin will take longer than with a fresh/smaller wiz.bin because it has to check & process things in the database. The more viewing history (and probably imported media) there is to check & the slower the computer, the longer it takes.
- Andy

Interesting. So, as wiz.bin grows larger as time goes by, the startup time will increase ? Right now, with about 18 months of data on my machine, it takes a long time. Will the startup time double with 3 years of data ?

Is this also the cause of slow gui response ? I seem to spend a lot of time watching the spinning "flower".

Ken C

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by Ken C

Interesting. So, as wiz.bin grows larger as time goes by, the startup time will increase ? Right now, with about 18 months of data on my machine, it takes a long time. Will the startup time double with 3 years of data ?

With my 3 years of data & a 2.8 jiggahertz p4 , it takes the service about 2 minutes to start, or less. That increased a little bit when I added a few thousand songs recently. I start the service pretty much only when a new version comes out, so I don't see it as a major road block, personally.

- Andy

[Kanati]

Resurrecting this old thread because this is exactly what I was looking for...

Startup time for me on a 2 gajiggahertz machine and about 3 years or so of data myself... We're not talking just recordings of favorites and manual recordings for that time either... we're talking all that time with "not quite smart" recording turned on and it recording nearly 24 hours a day and it takes longer than 2 minutes. By quite a bit. I think it's five minutes or so. And that's just too long when I'm rushing to get it started because it blew up for whatever reason and I have a recording that I want to get started in 30 seconds.

So... Is there a way to purge data from wiz.bin? Say... I only want the last YEAR worth of data. Or maybe I only want to keep my favorites and purge all other data... How would I go about that?
V5 btw...

[edit] Oh... and btw... Since it's processing all of this information up-front... Does that mean it's holding all that in memory and not just chomping cpu cycles but also destroying my paltry 1 gig of memory while it's at it? That would explain some slowdown in the UI as well.

Kanati

[coppit]

For what it's worth, I recently rebuilt my system with a Core 2 Duo. In the process I had to start clean. This seemed to help, although I've been spending a lot of time telling it I've seen shows.

[salsbst]

I understand that the work the profiler does requires heavy CPU startup time. But can the rest of the software not run until the profiler has brought itself up to date? I hope there's a way to allow the rest of SageTV to function while the profiler does its business, because that would probably longtime users very happy. Putting the profiler in its own thread and establishing a status of the recording/guide data as "being updated" would go a long way to helping us out with this problem.

[GTwannabe]

I wish Sage would ditch the clunky old Wiz.bin database in favor of MySQL or SQL Server Express. Mine is only 22mb, but it causes the Sage service to grind for 5-10 minutes on start. It only loads one of the CPU's, so whatever Sage is doing with the database sure isn't multi-threaded. I would expect this kind of poor performance from an Access database, but a 22mb database shouldn't cause a decent database engine to break a sweat.

[coppit]

Another update: things are much faster than they used to be. It seems like after my initial post, then next major revision was much faster. But it could also have been that my old setup had 3+ years of cruft that was slowing things down.

[sfisher]

Originally Posted by Kanati

Resurrecting this old thread because this is exactly what I was looking for...

Startup time for me on a 2 gajiggahertz machine and about 3 years or so of data myself... We're not talking just recordings of favorites and manual recordings for that time either... we're talking all that time with "not quite smart" recording turned on and it recording nearly 24 hours a day and it takes longer than 2 minutes. By quite a bit. I think it's five minutes or so. And that's just too long when I'm rushing to get it started because it blew up for whatever reason and I have a recording that I want to get started in 30 seconds.


Kanati

Profiler takes forever! And I end up re-booting much more often than some for Norton AV upgrades/updates / Windows updates and right now because I'm having trouble with one of the pvr 500 boards and I have to wait 20-30 minute each time to see if the change to the software took...or not.