"Hesitation" after hours of use

[Ken C]

Anyone else experiencing momentary hesitations ? In our case, they only show up after several hours of watching videos. All is working for a period of time and then these 'hits' start. Once started, they happen every 5-20 seconds. Rebooting the Sage machine, server, and extender cures the problem and it's good to go for the remainder of the evening.

The extender has the latest firmware and the Sage machine is running version 6.3.8 RC.

[sam99]

are the hesitations audio, video or both?

[Ken C]

Both. It's as if the pause button was toggled but only for a fraction of a second.

[sam99]

ah, not what I thought then. I was thinking of the audio stuttering caused by listening to mp3s and then watching a recorded dvd, but that never caused video stuttering.

[DigitalMan]

I've been seeing the pauses. It wasn't happening before updating to the latest firmware.

I haven't touched the sage server, still running 6.3.5.

[Ken C]

Anyone out there have any suggestions as to the cause and/or cure ?

Right now, everything gets rebooted prior to the evening viewing. Not the most elegant solution ...

[Opus4]

I noticed you said you were using the beta version, so I moved this to the beta forum. Contact SageTV for help tracking it down.

You could see if the debug log has any info about it.

Are there any other programs running that could interfere with disk access or anything -- antivirus scanning the videos as you play them, for example.

Are the recording drives using 64K clusters? I don't know how not using 64K clusters would make it stutter only after hours of usage, though.

- Andy

[dpackham]

yes this is happening to me with 6.3.9 rc. last night it was like a pause button every 30 seconds or so just for a second. a quick reboot and the problem went away. should I try to go back to 6.3.8? is it compatible to go back?

No AV at oll or any other running programs. clean system

Dave P

[Narflex]

Please submit a bug report to http://sagetv.com/bugs.html if you're experiencing this problem. We'd like to get more information from you.

[spacecadet]

Originally Posted by dpackham

yes this is happening to me with 6.3.9 rc. last night it was like a pause button every 30 seconds or so just for a second. a quick reboot and the problem went away. should I try to go back to 6.3.8? is it compatible to go back?

No AV at oll or any other running programs. clean system

Dave P

I had a problem similar to this once after I upgraded from Java 1.4 to Java 1.6. After awhile of use, Sage would reach the max heap size and start garbage collecting constantly, causing the stutters. I think a recent version of Sage started packaging 1.6, so if you had previously been running 1.4, this may be your problem.

The fix for me was to increase the max heap size. I think Sage uses 250 MB by default. I increased to 500 MB and find that Sage now typically grows to 350 and stays constant. An easy way to check if you are maxing out the heap is to look at the System Information and find the line that reports the java heap usage.

To increase the max Java heap for sage, you have to make a registry change. The instructions can be found at the end of this thread:

http://forums.sage.tv/forums/showthr...13&postcount=9

Hope this helps!

[reggie14]

I'm not sure if I'm experiencing this problem. I'm running 6.3.8. I've watched a few movies on the extender recently, and I've found that often 1.5-2 hours in to the movie playback will essentially stop and I'll get the spinning circle thing. It looks like the server stops feeding the extender more data. I sort of assumed it was a windows problem until I saw this thread. In my case I only had to pause the video briefly and then the problem appeared to go away.

Kind of annoying, but not a huge deal.

[Ken C]

I'll submit the bug report and post the results.

[Ken C]

I realize it's only been a couple of days but haven't had the problem since the bug report went in. Nothing has been changed or modified. I'll keep watching ...

[gplasky]

Not that this would be the case but I did by mistake use the Netflix plugin on the HD Extender and clicked the Watch Now button. Of course that won't work but what I didn't know that happened is it spawned an iexplorer.exe process on the Sage server. When I noticed some hesitation and glitches later the iexplorer.exe process was using over 800 MB of memory. Once I kileed that everything went back to normal and I haven't seen it happen again.

Gerry

[Ken C]

I canceled the bug report, haven't had the problem for days. All is functioning as it should. No idea what caused the hesitations or why they went away. Maybe just filing the bug report scared them away !!

[dpackham]

my stutter has gone away as well. i also did the java HEAP upgrade to 300 meg and Sage is reporting a stable 250 HEAP now. maybe that did it

Dave P

[DigitalMan]

I don't see it very often, but when it happens, I can jump back 10 seconds and I don't see it when that part replays.

[Ken C]

Yea, it's not part of the recording, it's in the playback.

What is the Java HEAP upgrade ??

[dpackham]

check out post #10 in this thread. its got instructions

DAve

[Ken C]

Thank you, Dave. Made the change and saved it in "Sage Tweaks"