Unusually high CPU usage

[megamojo]

I've noticed recently the my SageTVSercice.exe seems to be idling with way too much cpu usuage. When doing nothing active, as in no in progress recordings, no upcoming recordings for over 12 hours, no comskip processing, and nothing being watched on the main server or the 1 client I have, the sagetvservice process hovers between 20 and 40% CPU usage. This makes my total CPU usuage hover between 30 and 70% and sometimes higher, which is causing my CPU to run pretty hot. Since sage is the only thing that runs on this box, I don't keep very close track of it and to be honest the reason I noticed anything at all is because the CPU fan was running louder than I thought was normal. I've restarted both the service and the machine and this helps for a bit, but the high usage comes back and stays after a little while.

I think this may have started happening after I went from 6.3 to 6.4 a couple weeks ago, but as I said I treat this box as an appliance so I don't pay that much attention to it.

Hardware is as below:
AMD Athlon X2 4600 (2x2.4 Ghz) with Cool'nQuiet enabled
2 GB DDR2800
Asus M2NE mobo
2x Hauppauge PVR-150s
1x ATI TV Wonder Elite (theater 550 chip)

This box is completely dedicated to Sage and I only record standard def. I do have several addons, but that would not affect the sagetvservice process, just the UI, correct? The only thing "extreme" about my system is that I do have well over a TB of imported video stored on my slackware fileserver.

[gmijackso]

I'll start with I don't have a solution to your problem but I agree that something weird is going on in your system. I have a very similar setup (though everything is different lol very budget built) and even when recording an HD and a SD show simultaniously I only hit 6% total CPU usage with 4% of that being the Sage service.

The only thing in your system I was unsure of was the TV wonder Elite, but a google search shows that it is Hardware encoded correct? I was considering that perhaps you had inadvertantly left a live program running and backed out of the viewer without stopping the show (I do this from time to time and don't notice until I see Sage recording something like an infomercial). But even then I'd only expect such a high cpu rate if it were doing software encoding.

I guess if I were in your situation, first I'd make sure I had logging enabled and take a look through there and see if anything looked obvious (which I'd personally need help with). Then I'd try turning off any auto-compression you're doing, and seeing it it makes a change, then try turning off auto-comskip and see it it makes a change, etc.

Best of luck!
Fred

[megamojo]

Thanks for the reply. Yes, that tuner does hardware encoding, and no shows are recording either on purpose or accidentally at the times I'm talking about and the cpu is still used that much. I have logging enabled, and nothing looks weird to me, just very frequent checks of the video directories, but I assume this is normal. Also, comskip is not running during these times. I have it process in real-time so if there's no show recording it's pretty much not running. With a dual-core processor and real-time processing comskip almost never has a backlog of work. I also don't do any compression, ever, so that is not an issue. I just took a look at my network activity, and according to task manager the box is constantly using 0.5% to 1% of my gigabit network connection while idle (no recording, playback, or comskipping), which is around 1 MB/s, which to me seems kinda high for being idle. One of the release notes for version 6.4 did say that they changed the way the file browser worked, maybe there were some new bugs introduced as well. Since the only change I noticed in the upgrade, at least from an end user point of view, is the very much improved STVi system, and possibly this issue, I may just go back to 6.3 and see if the issue resolves itself.

[Lester Jacobs]

I just recently had a similar situation where the Sage process had an abnormally high CPU usage. After trying everything I could think of, a chance Google search result led me to open up my case and blow it out thoroughly with a can of air. In particular I blew out the CPU cooling fan and fins where I noticed a lot of dust had collected. I then restarted the system and , hey presto, CPU usage was back to normal.

Apparently dust on the CPU cooling fins significantly affects their ability to cool the CPU properly resulting in high CPU temperatures. Modern CPUs will slow down in face of high internal temperatures to protect themselves. As a result, any processes running on the CPU will take higher CPU usage than normal to perform the same tasks.

The above certainly might not be your situation but every bit of info counts when trying resolve these types of issues.


Cheers
Lester

[megamojo]

I will certainly blow it out since it has been awhile since the last time I did that, but I've been keeping an eye on the temps since I've started noticing this issue. The 2 cores don't get much above 50 C, which is much higher than I would like, but nowhere near high enough for the CPU to throttle itself due to temperature. Also, from watching the AMD power meter fluctuate up and down, the CPU is running at full speed when needed and working as normal.

[toricred]

Another thing to look at is what version of Java you are running. 1.5 had some issues with handle leaks that might be something like this although I don't think so.

[megamojo]

Running version 6 update 5.