SAGETV_PROCESS_LOCAL_UI Hang Detected

[pseudonym]

Not sure where to start with this one, hoping someone can help me. I did try to search these forums but didn't come up with anything useful... as always, if I missed, please point me thank you.

Intermittently I experience long pauses in the SageTV GUI, often just navigating in menus. Sometimes there will be a grey circle in the center going round, other times SageTV GUI is just unresponsive.

I have created debug logs and can see messages scattered throughout, like this one:

[AWTThreadWatcher-SAGETV_PROCESS_LOCAL_UI@55d7b] EventThread-SAGETV_PROCESS_LOCAL_UI Hang Detected - hang time = 1500

My system is not busy with much of anything at these times...

This has been happening, on and off, with SageTV versions from 6.2.x up through version 6.6.2.218 that I am currently running.

On some point releases I don't see much of this, while on I seem to experience it constantly. For example, I hadn't seen much of this until I installed the new STV 2009100701 on 10/11. But that doesn't automatically mean to me that the new STV is the cause. This has been an intermittent issue, and has sometimes been just as frequent when nothing has changed that I'm aware of.

Can anyone tell me how I might definitively track this and verify there is nothing wrong on my system? I don't want to open a SageTV bug report unless I can show reasonable evidence my system is not at fault?

Sorry for vague post but I'm wanting to be sure my system is clean first before thinking the issue is solely with SageTV software.

Thanks for any help and info,
--pseudonym

SageTV Media Center 6.6.2.218 running in system tray (not service)
XP Pro 32-bit SP3 plus all post hotfixes from m$
Sun Java JRE 1.6.0_14
Core 2 Duo E6850 (2 x 3ghz), 2G RAM, intel chipset
6x1T SATA II's with at least 100G free on every disk with a SageTV recording directory
SATAs running in AHCI mode via Intel Matrix Storage Manager drivers
OS/program files Partition has 25G free space
Disks defragged regularly
System does not hibernate or sleep

[stevech]

do you use other programs that are memory intensive? Such as transcoding or commercial-skipping? If so, this can cause virtual memory swap-out of memory segments of Sage's code, or JVM or some such. More RAM lessens this. It can take lots of disk seeks to get all those pages back into RAM. I may be on the wrong track with this.

[pseudonym]

Hello stevech thank you for your reply.

This box does very little else except run SageTV to record, that's its primary purpose. But yes I do have comskip set to run via DirMon2, in background about an hour after any show stops recording.

I had looked at processes and memory use in the past. But since you posted I looked again just now. The hangs are regular enough right now that I can reproduce them just by opening SageTV and navigating around the menus a bit.

I can confirm right now the hangs occur when SageTV is the only active process. (I'm using both the processes tab in XP's Task Manager, and Process Explorer from MS-Sysinternals, to judge whether there is anything active on the box).

But now there is also a message in SageTV that another STV is available (2009101301). I'm going to put that one up...standby...

OK I'm back...

I am not able to reproduce the hangs with the new STV... at least for the moment.

This issue has been intermittent for me through many releases, though, so I'll give this STV some time to run. I'll watch the logs to see if hangs are being noted, and I'll post back in a week or so what I find (or don't find).

Thanks again and regards,
--pseudonym

[pseudonym]

I'm back, sorry it was longer than a week! I'm hoping the hang issue is not only permanently resolved for me, but that my latest findings may help someone else.

Since I last posted here the STV has been updated a few times, and the hangs visibly returned after the last STV update. So I returned here to search again for solution.

I found several threads here discussing the SageTV Java Heap Size and its relationship to all manner of UI issues including hangs. Many reported simply increasing the default from 256 to 512 resolved their issues. (Some people increased to 750 or even 1024, depending on their use of SageTV and the available system memory, to resolve their issues.)

It's a simple registry edit. This thread http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=44706 gives info for both OS X and Windows settings, and also points to a very nice tool by babgvant, to edit common SageTV registry settings in Windows.

Well it couldn't hurt to 'up' my system from 256 to 512 and see what happens, right? Imagine my surprise when I discovered my system's SageTV Java Heap Size was set to 0!

I stopped SageTV, changed the SageTV Java Heap Size to 512, and started SageTV again. The difference in UI responsiveness is amazing!

I have not experienced any more hangs, and in fact the SageTV UI is 'snappy' everywhere now

There are still just a few scattered hang messages in the debug logs. The values are very small (usually 768, nothing so far over 1518.) This is a huge difference from the dozens of back-to-back hang messages with larger values (most in the 5000-8000 range, many 14000+).

I have no idea if this setting has always been -0- on my system, or if something inadvertently changed it along the way. I have never so much as even looked at this value before now.

I haven't run with this change long enough to claim the hang issues are permanently resolved. After I've been through a couple of STV updates and maybe a Java update, I'll post back.

Hope this helps someone else!

--pseudonym