SageTV & Threads ( Using multiple Cores )

[joe123]

Originally Posted by stanger89

Have you tried looking at CPU usage with "Show Kernel Times" enabled? If you don't have that enabled it can "hide" CPU usage in the OS/drivers for example.

What else did you do? Reinstall the OS?
.

I am using Process Explorer V10.21. I don't see an option for enabling Kernel Times. Where can I enable that?

As for OS, yes, I mentioned that I re-installed XP 32bit OS fresh on my new PVR setup. About a year ago, I also re-installed XP fresh on my old system hoping to get rid of the Circle of Deaths and the re-install helped maybe 2% faster, but nothing really noticeable.

I keep a copy of all of the software I need in a folder and I used exactly the same copies to re-install my OS and programs. Only difference being motherboard drivers of course since I have a new system.

I am not one to easily upgrade and like I said, I waited 6 years exactly because of this, because I did not want to make things any worse than they were already.

I am more than happy to try any thing else to get to the bottom of this, but in my case, all I can say is that my upgrade went against all of the advice here and it fixed the Circle of Death and my PVR recordings skips.

[joe123]

Originally Posted by blade

I have to agree with paulbeers and stanger89. There are far too many people, myself included, running Sage on much slower hardware that don't experience the "COD".

There are also LOTS of people here experiencing the Circle of Death with faster hardware.

I am not sure what the root cause is, but the Circle of Death has plagued several here including myself and I tried EVERYTHING said here to no avail.

Upgrading my PVR with faster everything pretty much got rid of the Circle of Death.

It could also be the way SageTV opens/access files which creates the COD on certain hardware platforms. I don't know what is the cause, but what I do know is that COD is very real affecting many here.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by joe123

I am using Process Explorer V10.21. I don't see an option for enabling Kernel Times. Where can I enable that?

It's just in normal task manager. FWIW, I tried Process Explorer "NT" IIRC (not sure which version) on my Sage server once, and it nearly brought the system to a halt when I started browsing all Sage's processes.

[blade]

Originally Posted by joe123

There are also LOTS of people here experiencing the Circle of Death with faster hardware.

I don't doubt that, but my point is if older slower hardware can run Sage without the issues you and a few others are encountering then advising people they need to upgrade their hardware in order to "solve" the problem doesn't seem logical to me.

There are so many things that can cause a computer to run slow. I've seen dying CD drives bring computers to a crawl even when the drives aren't in use. Hard drives on their last leg, bad IDE cables, faulty memory, etc.... all can either cause stability and/or performance problems. Then of course there could be driver or other software issues that result in poor performance or hardware that just doesn't work well together for some unknown reason.

I've read so many posts on this forum where people have complained about the performance or stability of Sage then later come back and say they had a faulty (fill in the blank).

I don't doubt your system runs better now. I just disagree that people need a quad core with 4 gigs of memory to have a smooth running system. I do hope someone figures out the cause of the problem. The more happy users there are the better.

[joe123]

Originally Posted by blade

I don't doubt that, but my point is if older slower hardware can run Sage without the issues you and a few others are encountering then advising people they need to upgrade their hardware in order to "solve" the problem doesn't seem logical to me.

You make a good argument which is true that there are so many things that can slow a system down, but the point remains.

I been building systems for 20 years now. I replaced all of the obvoius cables and simple things to no avail. I am actaully one who used to say NOT to upgrade and to upgrade as the last resort.

This brings me to my point. Let's say for the sake of argument it's reason X that is slowing down my system. Even with my experience, I was NOT able to find problem X and a comple new system SOLVED a huge problem I had for many years (5 at least).

I spent more time and MONEY in those 5 years trying to figure out and find problem X than if I would have simply upgraded.

So I agree with you to an extent, but you are simplying a very complex problem and making it seem like it's easy to track down the Circle Of Death which has eluded many here.

[ytulpan]

I run Sage on an old P4 530 Prescott box under win2008 32 bit and 4GB (3 usable) of RAM.
I have domain services, file and print server services, DNS, DHCP, routing services, Exchange Server, Housebot (automation server) utorrent, eventghost and others for a total of 103 processes.

The Sage installation includes 3 DVB-S2 physical (7 logical using Dvbe4Sage) tuners, a HD-PVR. There are 3 hardware and 4 software clients. Many times I can see 3 simultaneous HD recordings, and the HD-PVR is recording 2/3 of the time.

My recordings and imported media reside on 5 2Tb and 5 1Tb hard disks.

I experience no slowdowns, no circle of death, system is responsive. I can even run the client on the server box for testing purposes (in addition to the service) with no apparent problems.

The only performance improvement I made some time ago was to have a 80G SSD for as the system drive. The system was OK prior to that, now it's positively fast with interactive tasks as well.

So...I see people having problems with rigs having 10 times the CPU. It is all about the marketing success of Intel and AMD equating a powerful system with a fast CPU. It's more complex than that.

[joe123]

If all of this is true that hardware has nothing to do with the Circle of Death, then the opposite should be true.

Anyone here with really fast hardware setup AND also experiencing the Circle of Death (lasting a long time)?

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by joe123

If all of this is true that hardware has nothing to do with the Circle of Death, then the opposite should be true.

Anyone here with really fast hardware setup AND also experiencing the Circle of Death (lasting a long time)?

I don't think anyone said hardware has nothing to do with the Circle of Death, but what people ARE saying is that slow CPU's are not likely causes of Circles of Death. And yes, the opposite IS true. There are plenty here with quad cores complaining about the cod. And as already mentioned by others, it can be caused by failing hard drives, screwed up java install, memory problems, a glitch in the wiz.bin, etc. - even a single corrupt media file is known to cause problems. In any case, I'm pretty certain it WASN'T the faster CPU that fixed your problem. You could most likely downgrade that quad core phenom to a Single Core Sempron 140, and not see any higher CoD occurance rate than you have now.

[joe123]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

And yes, the opposite IS true. There are plenty here with quad cores complaining about the cod. And as already mentioned by others, it can be caused by failing hard drives, screwed up java install, memory problems, a glitch in the wiz.bin, etc. - even a single corrupt media file is known to cause problems. In any case, I'm pretty certain it WASN'T the faster CPU that fixed your problem. You could most likely downgrade that quad core phenom to a Single Core Sempron 140, and not see any higher CoD occurance rate than you have now.

I may be able to underclock my setup and simulate a much slower CPU and see if the Circle of Death comes back or not. So I will do that when I get a chance.

What are all of the plenty of other people here with quad cores complaining about the Circle Of Death? Maybe I missed them, but I don't recall except for 1 or 2. But plenty?

[ytulpan]

I would first take a look at the event viewer events (both server and client) and then check for possible communication errors (lost packets) between server and client with one of the many tools available for free. Also check that Netbios and DNS are correctly defined.

Also many 1GB/s lower-cost switches are flaky as are some NICs at 1Gbs. Try setting the ethernet speed at 100MB/s full-duplex non-negotiable for some time.

Any hiccup in the communications can result in temporarily losing Netbios handles with a really long recovery time. This is worse in XP then Vista/win7

[joe123]

Originally Posted by ytulpan

I would first take a look at the event viewer events (both server and client) and then check for possible communication errors (lost packets) between server and client with one of the many tools available for free. Also check that Netbios and DNS are correctly defined.

Also many 1GB/s lower-cost switches are flaky as are some NICs at 1Gbs. Try setting the ethernet speed at 100MB/s full-duplex non-negotiable for some time.

Any hiccup in the communications can result in temporarily losing Netbios handles with a really long recovery time. This is worse in XP then Vista/win7

When I was experiencing the Circle of Deaths, it was with SageTV running on the PVR itself and on the HD200. So it happened either way and I dont think it was not a network issue.