Sage craps out recording 4 shows at once

[jgourd]

Now that the new season is upon us there are times when Sage is recording 4 shows at the same time from two HDHRs. Three is OK but when that 4th recording starts up the client doesn't respond and all four recordings are unwatchable. The recordings contain huge macroblocks, streaks and the audio is choppy.

So the question of the day is: Is the bottleneck the network or the file system? It should be noted that when I was recording 4 shows at once with BeyondTV this never happened even though its NIC is only 100mbit.

The HDHRs are connected to a gigabit switch. One Ethernet cable goes to the home theater room where there is another gigabit switch with the Sage machine and the BTV machine connected. Inside the Sage machine are three 500gig SATA drives to record on (formatted with 64K clusters). It also has an Intel Core 2 quad processor. From what I have observed it looks like Sage spreads out the recording between the drives so I am leaning toward a network issue.

There are two additional NICs in the Sage machine that are turned off as they were only connecting to my network at 10mbits. I suppose I could connect each HDHR to one of these NICs and get them connecting at 100mbit which might rule out the network, this is a big pain for such a test as the HDHRs are in the basement currently. If I did this, how would the HDHRs get an IP address?

Could this be a simple buffer size setting issue?

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[sic0048]

Have you upgraded to Sage 6.4? There have been some changes recently with the HDHR drivers that have caused the HDHR to output a show at almost max bitrates. The older system would allow the HDHR to throttle back on the bit rate whenever it could.

So it is very likely that the 4 HDHRs are causing network bottlenecks. You can either upgrade to a gigabit switch and NIC for the server (perhaps $100 total), or only use three HDHRs until the throttling issue can be fixed.

[jgourd]

Originally Posted by sic0048

Have you upgraded to Sage 6.4? There have been some changes recently with the HDHR drivers that have caused the HDHR to output a show at almost max bitrates. The older system would allow the HDHR to throttle back on the bit rate whenever it could.

So it is very likely that the 4 HDHRs are causing network bottlenecks. You can either upgrade to a gigabit switch and NIC for the server (perhaps $100 total), or only use three HDHRs until the throttling issue can be fixed.

I am running 6.4.8, I have gigabit switches. I read this is a problem on the HDHR forums with 6.4.8. SiliconDust wants Sage to start recording specific streams instead of the whole thing.

My plan for Friday is to put each HDHR on its own NIC on the machine. There are two spares that I can use for this and it ought to fix the problem. In the mean time, thank goodness for usenet where I can download HD versions of the shows that Sage is messing up.

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[r00st3r]

As I replied to a post in the Silicon Dust forum http://www.silicondust.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5620 about not being able to record 3 or more shows in Sage with 2 HDHR, There seems to be a problem with 6.4.8 regarding PID filtering (I don't even know what that means).

There are a few of us having this issue that have our sage server and HDHRs on a gigabit switch, but it doesn't seem to make a difference. When the 3rd recording\watched show is started, the pic freezes up and all recordings are hosed. Jgourd can at least get the 4th started.

I don't want to solve this by throwing more hardware at it. I don't have any more slots to even add more cards anyway. I read on the SiliconDust forum that Jrockow downgraded Sage and it worked.

n frustration I went back to 6.4.3 and it worked OK. (with firmware 20080723).
Obviously that's not the solution. I don't want to be left behind on newer versions.

If I find a solution in any of the other forums where this is posted, I will reply back.

[DFranch]

I upgraded to a gigabit switch in preperation of adding another HDHR. When I had a 100 megabit switch I was at about 30-40 % throughput I figured if I added a second it would be 60-80% which is right at the max actual throuput I was achieving with that switch.