Constantly getting "Wait" circles

[Rurik]

[EDIT: Problem resolved In a way, see further down in thread]

This issue started about 10 weeks ago, and I've been ignoring it. But, it's slowly started wearing down my nerves.

The rotating "Wait" circle is appearing constantly when using SageTV, at every possible location. The circle then waits for anywhere from 5 seconds to 5 minutes, and then lets me continue.

For instance, if Sage is sitting at the main menu and the computer goes into screen saver: pushing an arrow button on the remote will cause the circle to appear... 20 seconds later I see the main menu.

If I browse through my video archive, just entering directories could make circles that last for 2-3 minutes. Noted, my archive is on another box, but I usually just end up opening Windows Explorer and manually opening the videos, all while Sage is "thinking".

The worst ones are where Sage will eat up 97-99% CPU while it waits. This usually occurs when playing a video off of the video archive, or when playing any local show and immediately fast forwarding into it. As soon as I jump ahead 20 seconds, it shows one frame and then the circle appears. I immediately Ctrl-Shift-Del, but it usually takes 3-4 minutes just to pop up task manager, browse to Sage, and kill it. All the while, Sage is trying to play the video at one frame per minute.

This started with the 6.3 versions, and I just upgraded to 6.3.10 hoping it'd fix it, but it hasn't.

In checking my SageTV_0.txt, I'm seeing a TON of the following lines throughout the day:
"Error in MediaServerConnection of :java.io.EOFException"
But nothing around the time period from when it's "waiting".

On a side note, I'm not getting any search results for "MediaServerConnection" on here

The following words are either very common, too long, or too short and were not included in your search : MediaServerConnection

[dagar]

http://www.google.com/search?q=MediaServerConnection+site%3Aforums.sagetv.com&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-USfficial&client=firefox-a

[carlgar]

You probably need to contact support with a log. I suspect your system just just not have to CPU power to support the current Sage. But you do meet the min. list requirements so Sage should determine the problem or increase their requirements. They should at least be able to tell you how and what features should be disabled. I doubt if the Jave.io.EOFException is a issue, I have seen those also. The 97-99% CPU is an issue, but may not be a bug. You are getting a CPU busy indication and Sage does not say anything about how fast Sage is on a slow CPU.
The spinning arrow is a busy indication not a wait, but it is implied that you need to wait for the operation to complete.

BTW: I believe 6.3 is when the animation was added. Turning off animation may be a start to getting decent speed.

[Rurik]

Thanks for the advice (and the Google search ).

I'll disable the animations and continue using the system and see if that resolves the issues.

[snipeman]

Increasing the Java Heap size solved these sorts of problems for me.

[matt91]

Just reporting in that I have a very similiar CPU, although I have a touch more RAM. I occasionally do see the spinning circles for ~ 10 seconds, but only once every week or so.

I'm running sage and a firefly media server on my headless server, and it seems to be able to minimally keep up with the task.

I imagine that I'll be upgrading the server in the next 24 to 36 months.

Matt

[AtariJeff]

I had this when my recording HD was near full. Cleaning out some older recordings (I have a lot of manual delete settings) improved performance. I've also had a flakey network switch cause issues as well.

[mdnttoker]

I get this only when the SageTVService bugs out and goes 100% CPU...stopping and restarting the service fixes it....but doesn't sound like this is your problem...

[Rurik]

I'm bringing this up from the dead for resolution.

I had a hardware issue that caused my PC to freeze randomly, anywhere from 1 min to 5 hours from turning it on. After a few weeks of this, and missing every show I wanted to record, I threw all the internals out and rebuilt it.

GIGABYTE GA-MA78GM-S2H w/ AMD Athlon X2 4450e 2.3GHz
Scythe SCMNJ-1000 "NINJA MINI"
G.SKILL 2GB PC2 6400
LITE-ON SATA DVD Burner

After a month on this new system, it is flying! It was simply an issue of not enough horsepower. I've re-enabled all animations and it's still very snappy.

BTW, I was incredibly impressed with SageTV on the reinstall. I backed up Program Files and my docs, wiped and reinstalled, and copied the files back over. After the quick setup, I was back to my regular menu with everything intact :tu:

[r00st3r]

This was happening to me as well. I found the transcoder was sucking up 100% cpu. After killing the task and re-starting the sage service, it has been fine since. Maybe a runaway process?