Intermittent slow response in SageTV

[wayner]

I have the latest version of SageTV running on WHS - my front ends are several HD-200s. The CPU in my server is an Intel E8400 and I have 2 GBs of RAM.

Recently I have begun having a problem where the response of the Sage UI will be really sluggish. For example, I will be watching a RecordedTV show and I will press pause or SkipFwd or one of the other transport keys. Sometimes everything will work fine immediately. Other times nothing will happen for many seconds, or maybe even a minute until it recognizes my key presses. The playback of the video file was fine - but for some reason Sage was really slow to respond as if the system was seriosuly bogged down. I will then have this problem for a few minutes and then it will go away and everything will be fine. This problem seems to occur no matter what type of file I am playing back - SD MPEG-2 files, HD H.264 files, HD MPEG-2 files, etc. But at all times the playback of the video file is fine - the problem is just with SageTV responding to user requests via the remote control.

Note that these problems occur with both RecordedTV files and other video files that were not created by Sage.

Has anyone seen this before and have any suggestions on what is going on or how to fix this? I had something similar, but worse, about 5 months ago and reinstalled the WHS OS as I seemed to be having a problem with the system hard drive which I replaced. That fixed the problem at the time but now that I am having this problem I am worried that it could be something similar or even a network or other server problem.

Any suggestions on how to narrow the problem down to Sage or the server?

At times while having these issues I have tried to reset the Sage Service and at times Windows was not able to stop the service. Could this be hardware issues? Could it be a networking problem?

[SteveW]

Originally Posted by wayner

I have the latest version of SageTV running on WHS - my front ends are several HD-200s. The CPU in my server is an Intel E8400 and I have 2 GBs of RAM.

Recently I have begun having a problem where the response of the Sage UI will be really sluggish. For example, I will be watching a RecordedTV show and I will press pause or SkipFwd or one of the other transport keys. Sometimes everything will work fine immediately. Other times nothing will happen for many seconds, or maybe even a minute until it recognizes my key presses. The playback of the video file was fine - but for some reason Sage was really slow to respond as if the system was seriosuly bogged down. I will then have this problem for a few minutes and then it will go away and everything will be fine. This problem seems to occur no matter what type of file I am playing back - SD MPEG-2 files, HD H.264 files, HD MPEG-2 files, etc. But at all times the playback of the video file is fine - the problem is just with SageTV responding to user requests via the remote control.

Note that these problems occur with both RecordedTV files and other video files that were not created by Sage.

Has anyone seen this before and have any suggestions on what is going on or how to fix this? I had something similar, but worse, about 5 months ago and reinstalled the WHS OS as I seemed to be having a problem with the system hard drive which I replaced. That fixed the problem at the time but now that I am having this problem I am worried that it could be something similar or even a network or other server problem.

Any suggestions on how to narrow the problem down to Sage or the server?

At times while having these issues I have tried to reset the Sage Service and at times Windows was not able to stop the service. Could this be hardware issues? Could it be a networking problem?

I've been having the same problem the last couple of weeks. Similar setup to you except my server is XP. Sometimes it takes almost a minute after selecting a channel (HDPVR) before the stream shows up on the screen. I'm running SageMC and have seen it happen wehn reading POP 3 mail, watching a recorded show, etc. Not consistent. Seems to have started since I put the latest beta HD200 firmware on my units...

[wayner]

Some of my HD-200s have the latest beta, or at least a recent beta, but some are running older firmware. I am beginning to think that this is more of a PC-OS problem or a hardware problem.

[banshee]

I have found this can happen with certain recordings...and concluded that something is wrong with the recordings. Once I delete the problem-causing files, everything is fine.

[madmadmaddog]

Originally Posted by wayner

I have the latest version of SageTV running on WHS - my front ends are several HD-200s. The CPU in my server is an Intel E8400 and I have 2 GBs of RAM.

Recently I have begun having a problem where the response of the Sage UI will be really sluggish. For example, I will be watching a RecordedTV show and I will press pause or SkipFwd or one of the other transport keys. Sometimes everything will work fine immediately. Other times nothing will happen for many seconds, or maybe even a minute until it recognizes my key presses. The playback of the video file was fine - but for some reason Sage was really slow to respond as if the system was seriosuly bogged down. I will then have this problem for a few minutes and then it will go away and everything will be fine. This problem seems to occur no matter what type of file I am playing back - SD MPEG-2 files, HD H.264 files, HD MPEG-2 files, etc. But at all times the playback of the video file is fine - the problem is just with SageTV responding to user requests via the remote control.

Note that these problems occur with both RecordedTV files and other video files that were not created by Sage.

Has anyone seen this before and have any suggestions on what is going on or how to fix this? I had something similar, but worse, about 5 months ago and reinstalled the WHS OS as I seemed to be having a problem with the system hard drive which I replaced. That fixed the problem at the time but now that I am having this problem I am worried that it could be something similar or even a network or other server problem.

Any suggestions on how to narrow the problem down to Sage or the server?

At times while having these issues I have tried to reset the Sage Service and at times Windows was not able to stop the service. Could this be hardware issues? Could it be a networking problem?

I'm having the same problem. Changed versions of java, and went from XP to 2003 with no change.

[wayner]

That's depressing. I am considering three things to fix this problem:

1) Doing a WHS server reinstall and keeping the same hardware in the hopes that this fixes the problem. But in my experience WHS server reinstalls don't always work and then there is the issue that I did this four months ago and the problem has reoccured.
2) Buying a new PC and installing WHS and Sage on this in the theory that the problem is either hardware (hard drive, network card, etc.) and that this will fix it. (I have an unused WHS license and a Sage server license that I could transfer over to this PC)
3) Buing a new PC and installing XP and Sage with a similar theory to the above but the thought that if there are issues that it is easy to recover from a server crash from XP than from WHS as you can just install a drive image and go from there. I would then duplicate all video files and other media (other than TV shows) on both the WHS box and Sage XP server. I own two Sage server licenses so I could also run Sage on each. This gives me a fairly high degree of redundancy with the exception of tuners, but I could likely live with no new recordings for a few days - the big issue is when the kids can't access their shows.

Options 2 and 3 will cost about $400-500 in hardware but should take less time - I have a bunch of hardware that I can recylce so I just need a new case, PS, CPU, and 1-2 hard drives. If I try option 1 and don't solve the problem then there will be lots of futzing around.

Anyone else have any ideas?

[mickp]

I'd check my system event log (eventvwr.exe) for any disk related problems. In my experience disk problems often manifest (intermittent?) symptoms like those described above and can easily go un-noticed.

Mick.

[sportera]

I'm having the same problem (Sage UI starts slowing down) but, I'm seeing it at my SageTV HTPC Client. It might be coming from the WHS but I'm not sure because if I shut down the Sage Client and then restart it the Sage UI starts working normal again(I don't do anything to the WHS). This is normally required once every day, but not always. I'm running the vanilla Sage UI and not SageMC. I'm running on Windows 7 64 at the client and WHS 2003 at the server. Both Sage machines have latest 6.2 upgrades. I've also upgraded Java. I don't see a problem with CPU load causing the slow down. It seems to be cruising along at about 14%.

Now that I think of it, I don't think I had this problem before upgrading Java. I upgraded in hopes of solving other problems. I'm currently running Java 1.6.0_18 on both Client and WHS. Sage Client is reporting Java 1.6.0_18 in System Information screen. Sage WHS is reporting Java 1.6.0 in System Information screen. Not sure why the WHS is not showing the "_18" at end of Java 1.6.0, but I'm sure the WHS machine is running Java 1.6.0_18 because pulling up Java in system Control Panel reports the version running.

Are you guys also running Java 1.6.0 release 18? If so, we might need to find a way to uninstall 1.6.0_18 and load an earlier version.

[wayner]

@mickp - Thanks for the suggestion. I have neglected to check the event viewer. My previous problem that required an OS reinstall used to throw tons of errors to event viewer but I totally forgot to check it.

@sportera - I will check to see what version of Java I am running. The client is irrelevant in my case as almost all of my clients are HD-200s although I do have a PC running Sage Client and I do also use PS.

[tmcgowan]

Do you have folder.jpg files in your movie folders? I found that having a 55k jpg file in each of my ~450 movies slowed down the HD200 paging function to almost a standstill. Although I liked having the cover art, it wasn't worth all the negative feedback from the family! i.e., "Are we there yet????"

So, I deleted all the jpgs and it took care of the problem.

[wayner]

I do have Fanart, some folder.jpg files, etc and I also have BMT installed which may be fetching metadata.

Rather than deleting all of the Fanart would it not just be possible to turn all Fanart off, at least as a first step? And then I could disable BMT as well.

On second thought perhaps it makes sense to slim down my Sage system as much as possible by turning off everything other than the main functionality - i.e. Fanart, SageWeb, SJQ, BMT, SageAlert, etc. Most of this stuff shouldn't really slow things down but you never know. I don't know that I want to switch from SageMC to the default UI but I guess I could go back to a basic SageMC setup without all of the bells and whistles. I also keep all of my Fanart in a network share rather than the c: drive on my server - although this Fanart is on a drive that is physically located on my server it is a WHS shared drive which may be slower to access then your basic C: drive.

I have monitored Task Manager on my server and the problems don't show up there - for example, it is not like the CPUs are at 100% when the HD-200s are totally unresponsive. And sometimes I also have problems attaching to the network drive from Windows Explorer which is totally outside of Sage, but these problems are much less frequent and could still be caused by Sage.

In addition should I be looking for any logs or db files that have gotten really large that could be causing my system to choke?

[Slipshod]

Sportera,

The WHS version of SageTV comes bundled with Java 1.6.0, and it will use that version instead of the system version. That's why the system info screen is not reporting 1.6.0_18. To make Sage use the system version instead, stop the SageTV service and rename the "jre" (Java Runtime Environment) folder in the SageTV directory, then restart SageTV.

I have really crappy performance on my WHS server on 1.6.0, especially with skipping forwards and back.

Cheers,
Slipshod