I May Have To Learn How To Live Without Service Mode (Stutter Related)

[Keenan]

Originally Posted by Keenan

It does seem high, but there's nothing else really running on the computer. The system idle number is right about the balance of the Sage number totaling 100%.

Also should mention I'm running 1080i out via DVI with 7600GT.

I've been struggling with my stuttering problem for weeks now, and it's a bummer as 3 of my 5 TV stations are 1080i. The 720p stations/recordings work fine.

I'm thinking of scrapping the install and starting all over.

Well, I scrapped ver. 6 and went back to ver. 5 and my CPU usage went way down to around 6-12% from the 45-70+ it was running with ver.6. I have no idea why Sage ver.6 would be so CPU intensive, but my 1080i stuttering is much less now as well, not completely gone, but far better than it was with 6.

[MTuckman]

I may be jumping on the bandwagon a little late, but I was having problems running the latest beta as a service and client on the same machine - stuttering, freeze ups (2 - 10 seconds), etc.

Yesterday morning I removed the service and just ran the client on the server, and it the result was astonishing. CPU utilization on the server stayed around 80-95%, but the responsiveness was 5 times better, no stuttering (SD programs) and no freeze ups. I also changed the decoder from the Nvidia to the InterVideo decoder, and while picture quality is a little worse (5-10%), it is acceptable and the HD programs don't stutter at all.

I don't like the idea that the client might have to be restarted every once in a while which would mean that any recordings would be interrupted, but I think I can live with that.

[Goodspike]

Originally Posted by cvitech

For what its worth, there is a version 1.4.2_13 of Java out now. This is not a beta version. I have tried the beta version and they do speed up things but I still have problems with it. The 1.4.2_13 seems much better. It seem to fix alot of things for me on my client side of things. I do run Sage in a service mode. I have noticed that the sage service consumes very little cpu utilization. It is about 1% to 2% on my server. When I run the sage client on the server as well, sage service will increase to about 6% to 10% and sage client will be around 60%. Of course, I never run the client on my server as a general practice.

Those numbers aren't a lot different than mine, but without service running, Sage itself would take up only about 20% rather than 40-60%+.

[ToxMox]

I'm curious if a utility like Process Explorer from Sysinternals would give more info as to what part of the service executable is using up the CPU. May give some insight. I don't have the problem so I can't test.

[salsbst]

I'm starting to believe that my service is actually fairly well-behaved relative to some others.

What I thought was a problem with the service seems to turn out to be a misdiagnosis. In fact, the unexplained CPU usage appears to be coming from recording using the WinTV 500... which I'll take to another thread. Just wanted to remove my stake from this thread officially.

[ToxMox]

I'm curious. How many of you that are experiencing these problems use UNC paths for your recording directories?

[salsbst]

And here I was thinking it was a *good* idea to break myself away from this thread... I figured since I'd isolated my CPU excess to recording, that I was having a different problem than this one, but perhaps not!

[Goodspike]

Originally Posted by ToxMox

I'm curious. How many of you that are experiencing these problems use UNC paths for your recording directories?

I am not.

[cummings66]

I haven't commented on the thread, but because I have the same issues I'll answer this question. I am not using UNC paths.

[Keenan]

I'm not using UNC paths for recording directories. I am for some music directories located on another machine.

From another post here I linked below, I turned write caching off on my recording drive and that seemed to help quite a bit. That along with reverting back to Sage 5 has made a considerable difference, not perfect yet, but much better. Although, it's sort of like horseshoes, close enough simply isn't getting it.

http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/show...994#post167994
Choppy HD video in Sage - SageTV Community

[ToxMox]

So much for my UNC path theory. Has anyone submitted a bug report on this yet?

[Goodspike]

Originally Posted by ToxMox

So much for my UNC path theory. Has anyone submitted a bug report on this yet?

I did. They've had the log file a couple of days now.

[salsbst]

While I suspect we may have different problems floating around in this thread, I believe my particular CPU excess (related to recording on local WinTV PVR card) seems to have been fixed by 6.0.16.

EDIT: ok, so I got home from work and now it's back to using the CPU 15-30% while recording.

Argh!

[mlord]

Originally Posted by ToxMox

So much for my UNC path theory. Has anyone submitted a bug report on this yet?

One idea for the v6 betas, is that they do have debug messages enabled by default. Perhaps this causes a lot more output (esp. for HDTV) than usual, and could be responsible for much of the stuttering.. ??

[Goodspike]

I think someone mentioned this as a possibility, but I think it's Zonealarm!

The problem got worse after I added an HD Homerun dual tuner device, to where it was taking up 100% recording two streams while watching with service enabled. But the ZA component was more obvious in taking up cycles.

Without ZA I can record two streams and watch with Service mode enabled, using fewer CPU cycles than with just recording one stream.

I've updated my bug report to reflect that, so we'll see what they say.

Anyone else using ZA (either with or without the problem using Service)?