Is there any point in switch off a Sage extender?

[wayner]

I recently had problems with Sage I was trying to use about 7 seven extenders. While troubleshooting this problem I discovered that the memory usage of Sage goes up when you turn on an extender but that memory is not given up when the extender is shut off. So if I start using all of my extenders I have to do a therapeutic restart of the Sage service.

Therefore what is the purpose of shutting of an extender? I believe it remains in "standby" state so I am guessing that there is very little change in power consumption - you can even see the green network light flashing when an HD-200 is "off" so you know that the CPU is still somewhat alive.

Shutting the extender off will mean that switching back to it will take a longer period of time - perhaps 10 seconds or more for the extender to connect to the server plus the wait time for the automatic connect.

So there is a downside to shutting off an extender - is there any upside? (Other than turning the annoyingly bright blue light on an HD-300 to red)

[Slugger]

"Powering off" an extender is supposed to free the heap memory it was consuming. Now, you won't see a decrease via task manager or other OS tools because even though the heap is freed by the JVM, once allocated the memory is not returned to the OS as long as the JVM remains running (but that heap memory is free for the JVM to reassign to other threads as necessary).

There have been plugins in the past that caused issues where a disconnected extender would not release its allocated heap because a plugin incorrectly maintained references to objects that disallowed garbage collection. I don't remember the plugin(s) in question as this was probably at least 18-24 months back that I hit it, but any plugin could be causing issues like this.

In general, it's best to disconnect/"power off" extenders that aren't is use and at least give the opportunity for the JVM to reclaim heap previously consumed by that extender.

[wayner]

You saw my posts about a month ago as I was running into problems with this. I had six extenders for about 8 months without problems. I added a seventh extender but never used it until I had relatives visiting over Christmas. Sage started to throw out of memory errors at that time.

This was even though there were never more than 3-4 extenders connected simultaneously. One thing that was exacerbating the problem was that SageTCPServer has an option to power on all extenders upon a Sage reboot. This was set to True so it was causing SageTVService to use 1.2GB of memory (according to Task Manager) within a couple of minutes of restarting the Sage service. I am pretty sure that everything was fine until that seventh extender was added and SageTCPServer has been on my system with this option turned on for months as well.

I now don't get these problems unless the Sage service hasn't been restarted in a week or two and we have started to use all of the extenders - once again no more than 3-4 simultaneously.

So my experience has been that the memory does not get released when an extender is shut off but I am just guessing as I am going by Task Manager and the behaviour of Sage which becomes slow and will throw an Out of Memory System Message.

Are there any tools that would give more granular info into the JVM heap use of memory?

But from my experience if you have six or less extenders then you are likely not going to run into problems leaving them on all the time.

[will]

Is there any negative impacts to memory usage when running multiple PC-based clients?

I'm guessing no because the PC client does all the UI renderings natively (unlike the extenders).

[tmiranda]

Originally Posted by will

Is there any negative impacts to memory usage when running multiple PC-based clients?

I'm guessing no because the PC client does all the UI renderings natively (unlike the extenders).

It will consume a little extra heap on the Sage server, but not much. IMHO this is about the only positive thing about clients vs. extenders.

[wayner]

There are other positive things about clients since it is easier to integrate external applications like Netflix, Hulu, etc.

[Fuzzy]

And external BD playback (Menus, BDLive, 3D, etc). Oh.. and these days, I think clients are cheaper... - if you can 'find' an extra license..