What CPU for Sage server

[wayner]

I am thinking of building a new Sage server and I need some advice on what CPU to get. My existing system is running WHS and has an Intel E8400 CPU. I am having problems and I am beginning to believe that, although the concept is good, WHS is not the best OS for Sage due to the difficulty in backing up the system drive. For some reason I keep having some major issues with my Sage/WHS system and I want to separate Sage from WHS. (I know that the next verions of WHS is coming out soon but I believe it is only 64 bit which means it is less useful since there are no 64 bit channel change drivers for firewire)

So what CPU should I get? I will be doing Comskipping of H.264 files so I need a relatively fast CPU and I will be running a 32 bit OS, likely XP, since you can't use firewire for channel changing with a 64 bit OS. Should I get another E8400? Is it worth getting a quad core - I rarely am doing more than one Comskip at a time so does more cores really help? Or should I get a faster Dual Core? Should I stick with a 775 chip or should I go to an i5 or i3? If so than what mobo makes sense - remembering that the mobo must have firewire and at least 6 SATA ports?

[MrVining]

I have yet to get comskip working, and I don't know if it is mulithreaded, but even if it isn't now, you never know what will happen later on. I would vote quad core. Plus then you would have room for other tasks like suing SageTV Placeshifter.

As far as CPUs I always go with the newest format available within budget, so proly i5 / i7.

[sic0048]

I think a good dual core would be fine for everything you are currently going to ask of the machine. Are you currently using the Playon plugin? That potentially can be another CPU drag. But even then, a dual core should work fine.

That being said, a quad core will give you a longer life cycle on this computer before it needs to be replaced. But the initial cost and future operating costs will be higher in the mean time with a quad core.

Personally I would build the computer for how you plan on using it in the foreseable future. Computer costs keep going down, so there is no need to "over build" a computer today with thoughts about what might happen in two years.

All that being said, I think WHS is a great platform to run SageTV on. Sure, it will be better in the future when WHS can back itself up, but there are several methods to automatically backup your important SageTV files. Sure it will take more time to rebuild the WHS and get SageTV running again in the event of a failure, but the added cost of running another computer 24/7 just doesn't make sense IMHO. Operating costs can easily run several hundred dollars per year, but it is a cost most people don't think about.

Another option is to run Sage in a virtual environment on the WHS machine, but you would probably loose the PVR-150 if you went that route. But at least you would be able to backup the Sage machine. Perhaps there is a decent USB tuner that you could use as a PVR-150 replacement. That would allow you to virtualize the Sage machine and not have to build or maintain a 2nd computer.

[wayner]

Originally Posted by sic0048

I think a good dual core would be fine for everything you are currently going to ask of the machine. Are you currently using the Playon plugin? That potentially can be another CPU drag. But even then, a dual core should work fine.

No Playon since I am in Canada and services like Hulu, etc. will block IPs that aren't coming from the US.

[autoboy]

You can run Comskip on any computer in the house. Same with PlayOn. Keep running Comskip on the WHS.

So, you could just run SageTV on any machine. An Atom would work fine, or one of the $35 Single Core Semprons would work great and you would have an upgrade path to a six core chip if you wanted to. You can run it on any old PC you have in your house or buy a used PC for $50 since there are a lot of older PCs that would run SageTV just fine as long as it didn't need Comskip. I would go knock on my neighbors doors and find an old PC if I didn't already have 4 old PCs that could work already.

If you are cool you could run a virtual instance of XP on your WHS, or just backup the sageTV files regularly using different backup software and forget the extra machine.

[wayner]

One of the reasons that I want the extra machine is that it gives me a higher level of redundancy. I have two Sage Server licenses and I will eventually run Sage on both.

Having two servers means that even with a severe hardware failure I should easily be able to switch over to the other server from any of my HD-200s. I wouldn't have tuners set up right away but I could play back all existing content which is more important to me. I plan to keep all of my media on both drives and to synchronize these drives rather than using WHS duplication. Now that I think about it I should probably start a thread on what I want to do.

[sic0048]

Originally Posted by wayner

One of the reasons that I want the extra machine is that it gives me a higher level of redundancy. I have two Sage Server licenses and I will eventually run Sage on both.

Having two servers means that even with a severe hardware failure I should easily be able to switch over to the other server from any of my HD-200s. I wouldn't have tuners set up right away but I could play back all existing content which is more important to me. I plan to keep all of my media on both drives and to synchronize these drives rather than using WHS duplication. Now that I think about it I should probably start a thread on what I want to do.

Not to be arguementative, but you are talking about running a 2nd computer for the worse case scenerio. It is going to cost between $100 and $200 per year just in energy costs to run that computer 24/7. Only you can decide if it is worth it.

[SWKerr]

I recently moved from WHS to a new box with Win7-64 for some of the same reasons. Running a RAID-1 boot and RAID-5 data stack. Very Happy so far.

If you are going with a new system the 775 makes no sense. I would go with AMD myself. Better bank of the buck at the low end which is all you really need. The AMD Athlon II X3 435 is only $64 ($71 with fan) and will work just fine. It will probably unlock to 4 cores as well.

I would spend the money on a good motherboard for the server. A good motherboard makes all the difference for the server. I\O and USB are really more important than cpu. This is what I used on the new server an it has been rock solid. It has 8 SATA ports and I am using the onboard RAID. The onboard graphics are also very good as well.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813128435

[blade]

I don't really see why your existing server wouldn't be powerful enough. I'm running Sage on an Opteron 175 overclocked to 2.81 ghz. With Playon my cpu usage jumps to around 30-40%.

I don't have any experience processing h.264 files so maybe you do need more power. I use comskip and the playnice setting so that a 1 hr show takes 45-50 minutes to process. The files are processed as they're being captured so the processing is finished a couple of seconds after the capture is complete without my cpu usage ever going above 5-10%. I think it's actually closer to 1-3%, but I could be mistaken so I wanted to give more conservative numbers.

Anyway even if you upgrade you might want to look into processing shows as they capture and minimizing the CPU spikes if you're worried about processing power.

[Peter_h]

Comskip is multithreaded so you will benefit from having more cores.

I would look at the AMD offerings. They are going to have the best bang for the in regards to multicore processor.

I am looking at building a new workstation and the Phenom II x6 1055t is calling my name. You really can't beat a 6 core processor that easily overclocks to 4ghz for $200.

[Fuzzy]

I'm pretty sure comskip ISN'T multithreaded, that said, if you comskip and record at the same time, and are routinely recording more than one thing at a time, then multiple cores DO help. (As each comskip process can use a separate core). Persoanlly, I like the forward compatability of the socket AM3 system. Buy a not bottom of the line motherboard (with integrated graphics), and a low end AM3 chip. This will provide easy upgrade later to an AM3 quad core (whose prices will probably drop in a couple years as the 6 core chips start making inroads).

[wayner]

Originally Posted by sic0048

Not to be arguementative, but you are talking about running a 2nd computer for the worse case scenerio. It is going to cost between $100 and $200 per year just in energy costs to run that computer 24/7. Only you can decide if it is worth it.

That's one way to look at it, another way is that I would be spending $0.50 per day (or the cost of one Starbucks Latte per week) to make my solution much more redundant.

I still want to have WHS for the backup and restore capabilities as well as for the web server functionality. I know that you can do all of this on other OSes but it is easier on WHS. Once I get the new system up and stabilized I will likely rebuild the WHS box so I could try to get everything running on that box if I really want to but then I run the risk of the current problems that I am having with my WHS server which I already rebuilt 8 months ago.

[wayner]

Originally Posted by SWKerr

If you are going with a new system the 775 makes no sense. I would go with AMD myself. Better bank of the buck at the low end which is all you really need. The AMD Athlon II X3 435 is only $64 ($71 with fan) and will work just fine. It will probably unlock to 4 cores as well.

Thanks - I just mentioned the 775 Intel CPUs since I am more familiar with them and it seems like fewer of the i3 amd i5 mobos seem to have firewire which I far prefer for channel changing.

[ericscottf]

I'd go with the newest socket and a relatively middle-power quad core. It isn't worth buying bleeding edge ghz, it'll just be half the price in a few months, and if your tuners are encoding for you, ghz isn't nearly as important as cores (imho)

Multicore is nice because if one process decides to be a jerk and hog the CPU, sage won't suffer (unless it is a multicore app and it goes nuts, gotta watch out for that -- ffmpeg got me the other day)

I also like the idea of having a separate USB chip for every major high-bandwidth USB device (drives, HD-PVRs, etc), and only certain mobos have more than two separate chips.

Comskip is not currently multithreaded, and if you're running it "live" (and you should be), it uses very little power once it has caught up with the leading edge of the show. on my comp, it takes 1-2% once it is caught up.

See my sig for what i've got -- had i bought 4 months later, i would have gone with a core i7, but it was just silly-expensive at the time. The whole multicore+hyperthreaded thing is really nice.

I'd say some reasonable i7 quad core chip and maybe a gigabyte or stock intel mobo. I really like abit products, but they're gone.

[wayner]

Isn't more GHz required for faster Comskip encodings? Aren't you better off with a faster dual core than a slower quad core when it comes to comskip.

What mobos have separate USB chips for higher USB bandwidth? Is there one with at least 6 SATA ports and firewire. My existing Sage mobo is an Asus - I think it is a P5Q-Pro and it has no problems with two HD-PVRs working simultaneously.

[blade]

Originally Posted by wayner

Isn't more GHz required for faster Comskip encodings? Aren't you better off with a faster dual core than a slower quad core when it comes to comskip.

Yes, if you're only running 2 or less instance and aren't processing shows as they record. If you're running more than 2 instances each one will run on a different core resulting in more shows being processed in the same amount of time. If you're processing as they record then a faster processor might shave a second or two off the time it takes to process a show.

Is there any reason you don't want to process shows as they're being captured? All you need is for each core to process a 1 hour h.264 recording in 45-60 minutes. If you're system can do that then you should be able to process at least as many h.264 captures in real time as you have cores.

[wayner]

Originally Posted by blade

Is there any reason you don't want to process shows as they're being captured? All you need is for each core to process a 1 hour h.264 recording in 45-60 minutes. If you're system can do that then you should be able to process at least as many h.264 captures in real time as you have cores.

No good reason - by default it doesn't do real time and I just figured out that I would get it up and running properly before I switched to real-time. Of course that was 1.5 years ago. I find that in my crrent setup it is just slightly faster than real-time - ie. it takes about 1h45m to comskip a two hour show. Most of my recording is from channels without commercials or is of hockey or basketball games that I watch in near real-time so I don't mind manually skipping as I am constantly using the remote to FF/Skip through free throws, stoppages in play, etc.

[ewelin]

I've also been toying with the idea of pulling sageTV off of my WHS box and putting it on a dedicated win7 system. My reasoning is my WHS box is a custom build and it also runs my home automation as well as a couple other programs that aren't standard on a WHS box. From day 1 I had issues with my HD-PVRs, but got them stable for about 6 months up until about 2 weeks ago. Since both the home automation and HD-PVRs are usb based i'm starting to wonder if that's my issue. I'm going to try and borrow a neighbor's old PC to test sagetv on it's own on that box and if the HD-PVRs become stable, i'll do a new sagetv box.

My only question, is right now all of my recordings and media is stored on my WHS box and is taking up about 4.5TB of my 5.5TB data pool. If I go with a new sagetv box, would it be better to transfer some of those drives to the sagetv system and move all of the tv recordings and movies over or could I just drop in a 200gb drive in the sagetv system and have all recordings go to the WHS pool like the currently do. Once separated the WHS will do comskip processing as well as my office PC during nights to catchup if there is any backlog. The sagetv box will simply run sagetv and it's plugins and nothing else.

[wayner]

Originally Posted by ewelin

My only question, is right now all of my recordings and media is stored on my WHS box and is taking up about 4.5TB of my 5.5TB data pool. If I go with a new sagetv box, would it be better to transfer some of those drives to the sagetv system and move all of the tv recordings and movies over or could I just drop in a 200gb drive in the sagetv system and have all recordings go to the WHS pool like the currently do. Once separated the WHS will do comskip processing as well as my office PC during nights to catchup if there is any backlog. The sagetv box will simply run sagetv and it's plugins and nothing else.

I don't know that you would want to keep the TV recordings on the WHS pool since you are introducing additional points of failure such as your networking hardware between both PCs. I would record to a drive on the SageTV.

My idea is to keep TV recordings on the Sage server (running XP) and keep other media files (Music, Movies, Photos) on both the Sage server and WHS. I would turn off WHS duplication but I would use something like Synctoy to keep those folders in Sync between those two PCs so that all files (except Recorded TV) will be stored on two separate PCs. I will likely move some of my hard drives from my WHS box to my new Sage/XP server.

This means that I can tolerate failures of either PC and still have all of my Movies/Videos available which is important to me. I will also have Sage running on both PCs so I just have to point my extender to the other server to get everything back up and running. I can live without my Recorded TV shows and without tuners for a day or two although I may put some old tuners in the WHS box

[ewelin]

I guess the reason I like WHS for the recordings is that I have 3.5tb of recordings and the drive pool is really handy. I don't have duplication on those files, but it is nice that it's just one network share that has all of those files. I really hope to avoid having to add a new share to sagetv every time I add a new harddrive to the picture. We have a lot of recordings that we keep longer term or there are series, like law & order that I just started getting into so I have all 20 seasons and I'm slowly making my way through them. Also with comskip being done by the WHS I thought it might be more efficient since it was doing the file locally.

I can see benefits of each method, I'm just not sure which route I want to take, hence the question here. I guess with WHS Vail changing the way drive extender works, it may make sense to have the files stored on the sagetv server that away I can swap the harddrives to other PCs and still access the files if a failure ever occurs. I do plan to upgrade my WHS box to vail about a month after RTM.

My movies collection is only about 2 dozen disks currently so I don't care if I loose those as they are mostly my son's DVDs. Eventually I may add all of my DVDs once My Movies is ported as I really like the management tools. I guess I really like the idea of having everything centralized on WHS it's just I don't know if that's the best solution. If storing the files on a Sage PC would allow sage to perform better, I guess I would go that route.