SageTV very sluggish on WHS

[hucker]

I have had SageTV and the HD200 for about a month. I've been testing it and I have isolated what appears to be a Sage issue...

The UI on sageTV appears to lockup for about 20 seconds periodically. At first I thought this was a WHS issue. I've done the following:

1) disable indexing
2) throttle the demigrator.exe program using threadmaster
3) remove unneeded applications.

Currently the non-standard things I have running are mymovies and a squeeze server via addin's in WHS. The machine has 2 NIC's.

What I see in SageTV is that the UI will become completely unresponsive for about 20 seconds. Initially I thought this had to do with WHS doing other stuff. I have ruled that out, I think.

In a test I ran SageTV and had opened Process Explorer and Firefox. I would surf through the Sage TV menu's waiting for the lockup. When it happens process explorer indicates no activity to speak of. I can alt-tab to other applications and interact with them. SageTV is sitting there dead, with black areas in the UI where it has not repainted itself. There is NO spike in CPU, memory or disk I/0 while the UI unresponsive.

It looks like the UI thread is blocked in SageTV and is sitting on a 20 second or so timeout. I looked to see if Sage was opening any network connections during this time and Process Explorer did not show anything.

I have checked the event logs and there is nothing sagetv related but there is a cqvsvs.exe thing happening once a minute. In researching this it does not appear to be the problem as no other applications are impacted and the UI issues are definitely not in phase with a 1 minute interval.

Event Type: Warning
Event Source: CqvSvc.exe
Event Category: None
Event ID: 9000
Date: 5/17/2010
Time: 5:38:00 AM
User: N/A
Computer: GROB103
Description:
Exception occurred: System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException

Message: Retrieving the COM class factory for component with CLSID {7D096C5F-AC08-4F1F-BEB7-5C22C517CE39} failed due to the following error: 80070422.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

The machine is a 3GHz Pentium 4 Processor w/3Gigs of RAM.


I'm having an HD200 issue related to the UI experiencing delays and stutter but I would like to fix this first.

Any help would be appreciated!

Chuck

[lpitman]

Wow, what versions of SageTV and HD-200 are you running??? I run SageTV on WHS and HD-200 without any issues for quite awhile now..I thought it was pretty solid.

[JetreL]

My experience with WHS is never ever ever have your recording directory on the WHS shared drive. Follow this simple rule and you will be amazed at how many issues you resolve.

I have heard of others using the drive and having good experiences but I have never seen it myself on a quad core system w/ 4 gigs of ram.

[Skirge01]

I'm running 13TB in the drive pool and have no issues with SageTV locking up and there are plenty of others who do the same. This doesn't mean you don't have a storage issue, such as a dying drive or something.

Pure speculation on my part, but I'm thinking you may have a network issue. Try changing cables, shorter runs, and, if possible, a different router. Also, check your NIC and router settings to ensure you don't have something strange set (NICS have unique settings, so I can't suggest anything to look for). Try the other NIC if you haven't already, as well. I'd also ensure your ports aren't causing blocks, as well as any making sure any firewall or A/V software isn't causing a block.

[Bikeman]

Chuck,

It appears to be a known issue. http://forum.wegotserved.com/index.p...svcexe-issues/

[hucker]

@Bikeman:
Yeah I saw that post but the simple command line didn't fix it...

@JetreL:
I am not recording anything, don't even have a capture card yet. I'm just playing movies. The UI issues happen on the server itself NOT a client. I am NOT playing any media while these events occur.

@Skirge01:
Do you really think I have a network issue even though I'm doing this test on the WHS server itself, I'm not playing any media?


As for the state of the drives, all drives were purchased new around Dec 1 09. The server is a 1U rack server with 4 SATA drive bays of which 3 are used.

How do get version information for the server and the client? I can find the STV date code version string and it is the most recent but I don't see any others.

[gatorwes]

I didn't think WHS supports multiple NICs?

http://social.microsoft.com/forums/e...-f062b94e76c4/

[grison]

I am also running SageTV on WHS. It's a Core I3-based system, with recordings in the pool (on drives with 64kb clusters).

I haven't had any recording issues (even with 4 streams at once while also doing playback), but I have had occasional playback issues that I traced to the demigrator service. I tried to throttle demigrator as well, but doing so had no effect. Stopping the service, however, resolved the issue.

At present, I use task manager to schedule demigrator so that it only runs outside of my normal viewing hours.

I've contemplated moving my recordings outside the pool to see if that would help, but the actual recordings are fine. The demigrator issue was affecting playback only, of both recorded TV and archived DVD's.

If there's an alternate solution, I'd be interested!

- Jeff

[wayner]

I have a similar setup and I am having what appears to be the same, or a very related problem. I run Sage without problems for over a year and then I started to get some problems. I think they were due to a flaky system drive in WHS which I replaced which forced me to have to reinstall WHS. Everything was fine for a month or two but now I am having issues but I am not getting any errors about issues with my system drive.

Here is the thread that I started - does this sound similar?

Intermittent slow response in SageTV

I can't find the posts now but I believe I have seen others post about very similar problems. It could be network problems but at times I get the temporary freeze-up on the Sage UI (while navigating menus, not while playing shows which you can't do on WHS anyhow) running on the server so I don't see how that would be a network issue since everything is local to the server in that instance.

[frontlinegeek]

I would look at drives or the NIC as the culprit. Let me tell my stories to back up why I say this.

Drives...

I first started messing around in a dedicated fashion with WHS after they fixed the bug that deleted data. At that time, I was just using whatever hardware I had on hand. It took very little time and I was buying more and larger drives. The choice of drive I leant to was Seagate. Not a good choice. I had every manner of issue from slowness to crashing to poor interface performance even on a dedicated client HTPC.

After unending troubleshooting, I eventually discovered that Seagate 7200.11 drives of ALL sizes are total garbage (See my blog if you want all the drama: http://www.frontlinegeek.com/general...e-for-now.html http://www.frontlinegeek.com/home/20...e-it-stop.html)

So literally all but 1 drive of 5 in my server was Seagate. As each drive was retired as it failed, my server just got better and better. Even an older 7200.11 320 GB Seagate IDE had caused serious issues and was removed over time. I replaced ALL my Seagates with Western Digital and all has been excellent since. I just recently added a 2TB EADS series drive after rebuilding for the 3rd time in 3 years (Just repurposing and reassigning hardware to where it was all best suited.)


Network Cards...

Ah the humble network card. At one time, these were NOT cheap and easily cost what a whole motherboard does now. In the last 5 years, there is not a system alive that does not have a NIC built onto it. However, even with modern systems, a GOOD network card is still a separate purchase unless you invest some serious money into your motherboard.

WHS is based on Windows Server 2003 Standard and thereby also follows the majority of the HCL that Server 2003 has. This means that if you are not using a NIC of reputable quality or that is on the HCL, you are gonna have issues.

My most recent rebuild saw me install on an Asus M2A-VM HDMI and rely on the RealTek NIC that is on it. That was not a good choice at all as I had stability and performance issues for the whole week that I tried different versions of drivers from both Asus and RealTek. I mean everything was happening: SLOW menu response, slow response to play/pause, halting video, dropped connections and even a couple BSODs.

I got pissed off and went to the local wholesaler in town and bought an Intel PCI-E Gigbit CT series card and have not looked back since. The server is just serving its face off without ANY delays. The card cost me $45 after tax but it was well worth it after a week went by and the thing was as solid as a rock and the whole reinstall/new NIC has been the fastest and most reliable build I have done yet and short of the horrible Seagate issues, the previous build was pretty damn good too. (Was a X2 4000+ on a GA-MA78GM-S2HP with 2 GB of RAM. That beautiful board was reassigned as an HTPC)

So, after all is said and done, the current setup is:

Asus M2A-VM HDMI
Athlon X2 5200+
2 GB DDR2-667
Boot Drive - WD Blue 500 GB
Storage drives: WD Blue 500 GB, WD Green EADS 1 TB, WD Green EADS 2 TB
NIC - Intel Pro 1000 CT
Coolermaster 600 watt PSU
Main network segment - DLink 8 port Gigabit switch (Green power series)


This setup is running uTorrent, SageTV for WHS, acts as the storage pool for Sage content and as the file server for the house and also does full system backups of 2 PCs and a laptop. It serves 3 SageTV Client HTPCs and a placeshifter client. There are no hesitation issues at all. Even when watching shows at midnight when WHS starts doing backups of the PCs on the network.


I suggest that you very carefully examine your drives with either the mfgrs software or with SpinRite from http://www.grc.com and see if there are not some issues that are not yet greivous enough to cause WHS to report a bad drive but bad enough to cause issues none the less.

I would also STRONGLY suggest that you make sure that the NIC you are using has a REAL W2K3 Server driver for it or go and buy a real NIC that is on the HCL for W2K3 Server. Oh, HCL = Hardware Compatibility List.

Good luck and have fun!!!

[grison]

I'll have to look into the NIC issue, as I'm currently running off the realtek-based motherboard NIC on my Gigabyte GA-H55-USB3. Interestingly, backups have had no effect on playback, but demigrator.exe specifically still seems to cause remote playback stuttering even when it's pulling less than 5% of the CPU.

As for drives, I'm also using WD EARS (jumpered) and EADS for the storage pool, and they seem to be running quite well.

[frontlinegeek]

You sure you have that EARS drive set properly? I don't have one yet myself but I know if you do not set it up right, Windows before Vista will not perform well.

[grison]

Good point. EARS drives do need a jumper to operate in pre-Vista operating systems, or there's an alignment procedure if you don't want to use a jumper. I used a jumper and the drive performs flawlessly.

(As it turns out, my demigrator glitch was happening even before I added the EARS drive, so I'm confident it's not the source. Some folks have indeed had issues with mis-configured EARS drives, but I've yet to hear of properly jumpered/aligned ones behaving badly.)

[frontlinegeek]

Cool. Just wanted to be sure that you set it up knowing why you needed to do it and you know and sounds like you did.

As for the OP, hopefully he can test some things and get back to us so we can see where he stands...

[hucker]

Thanks for all the feedback, here is some more information

1) I have a super micro motherboard used for IT applications with 2 on-board Broadcom NIC's and a controller for 4 SATA drives. The performance of the system is not changed if I disable one of the NICs. The driver is dated 3/15/2010.

2) I have 3 hard drives all were brand new. The system drive is a Seagate 7200.12 1TB drive while the other two are 1.5GB Western Digitals. I downloaded SeaTools and thus far everything has passed.

3) The NIC's pass their internal self-tests and looking on the statistics pages show 0 errors, collisions, deferrals or other error types.

4) Demigrator seems to be at the heart of the problem. Even though it is throttled it does seem to make things worse when it runs. Tonight I watched a movie all the way through without a stutter when demigrator was disabled. That is a first. This is consistent with what I have read of other's having issues with demigrator even with threadmaster controlling CPU.

5) Most of the movies I watch are from handbrake in m4v format. I'm not sure if decoding that format is more time consuming that other formats....

6) As for my client side problems something I'm not clear about is if the stutter is caused by the server or the client. It could be Java on the Server, network issues, server OS issues or client issues. I'm not sure how to isolate these... I haven't even found how to find what versions of all the software I have running.

[Skirge01]

I'm leaning more towards a drive issue at this point. grison mentioned this in passing, but I think it could very well be your issue. Are your drives formatted to 64k clusters?

[hucker]

Originally Posted by lpitman

Wow, what versions of SageTV and HD-200 are you running??? I run SageTV on WHS and HD-200 without any issues for quite awhile now..I thought it was pretty solid.

No I'm not formatted for 64k clusters. I somehow missed that when I built my system. Darn. So I can give 64k clusters a try.

So now my problem is that my SeaGate drive is my system drive... How the heck to I fix that? I could find a 1tb WD drive and dupe the SeaGate. Will that work? Best practice for upgrading the system drive?

[grison]

As far as the system drive is concerned, I wouldn't bother switching that to 64k unless it's also your main recording drive. I left mine at the default cluster size even when I switched everything else, since things only get stored there as a last resort.

Another thing to consider: the new SageTV version 7 claims to no longer need 64k clusters for optimal performance. I'm already formatted for 64k, but I switched my main WHS/SageTV system to the version 7 beta today without incident. (I suspect demigrator.exe will still cause the same problems for me, though.)

With regard to the beta, the folks who've been testing it privately for quite a while now say it's very solid, so I'm willing to run it on my main system because the new features are so compelling. (We finally get plug-ins!)

Now my big question is whether to bother switching back -away- from 64k clusters...

[blade]

Originally Posted by grison

As far as the system drive is concerned, I wouldn't bother switching that to 64k unless it's also your main recording drive. I left mine at the default cluster size even when I switched everything else, since things only get stored there as a last resort.

Your system drive should not be formatted to 64k. If you're recording to the same drive as the OS then to use 64k you'd want 2 partitions. One for the OS at the default size and the other for recordings at 64k.

Now my big question is whether to bother switching back -away- from 64k clusters...

Why would you want to switch back? The only way you're going to see any benefit is if you have a lot of small files (less than 64k). If you do have a lot of small files then you're going to save some space on the drive. How much is going to depend on how many files you have and what size they are.

[grison]

Originally Posted by blade

Your system drive should not be formatted to 64k. If you're recording to the same drive as the OS then to use 64k you'd want 2 partitions. One for the OS at the default size and the other for recordings at 64k.

Good point! I was assuming we were talking about the D (Data) partition of the system drive, as opposed to the C partition. You are exactly right that the latter should be left as-is. The point I was trying to make is that even the data portion can probably be left alone, as it won't get used for storage in most instances.

Originally Posted by blade

Why would you want to switch back? The only way you're going to see any benefit is if you have a lot of small files (less than 64k). If you do have a lot of small files then you're going to save some space on the drive. How much is going to depend on how many files you have and what size they are.

Yeah, I was trying to think if there was any substantive benefit that would make it worth the hassle to switch back. If all I'm going to get is a bit of space savings, it's likely not worth it.

Thanks,
- Jeff