Gemstone "speed"

[Carlton Bale]

Back to the topic, will the latest Gemstone/Phoenix Core image caching update speed up the extenders? Is caching the aspect of Gemstone that was slowing down extenders?

I don't know how much storage is available within each extender and if it's used for caching. Would connecting a USB drive to the extender allow for improved caching?

[jusjoken]

Originally Posted by Carlton Bale

Back to the topic, will the latest Gemstone/Phoenix Core image caching update speed up the extenders? Is caching the aspect of Gemstone that was slowing down extenders?

I don't know how much storage is available within each extender and if it's used for caching. Would connecting a USB drive to the extender allow for improved caching?

Extenders use the shared cache on the Server's disk... not on the extenders themselves.

The recent phoenix core caching change "may" improve performance and heap size for extenders... only time and testing will tell for sure. Our testing did prove that it greatly reduced disk usage and from what we could tell had no affect on the fanart quality. If it improves performance and heap then that will be a good bonus.

k

[appelm]

I've found that there is a great speed difference between my HD300, HD200, and HD100. I have all three running with Gemstone. The HD300 works great as expected. The HD200 Gemstone interface is somewhat laggy. Sometimes I have to wait a many seconds for the interface to respond to remote presses. I'm not talking about just the flows view. Simply navigating the main menu can take time. Finally, the HD100 is almost unusable. On the HD100, I sometimes have to wait a full minute for remote keypresses to respond.

Is there much I can do to improve the performance of HD200 and 100 with Gemstone?

[jorton]

What server hardware and network setup do you have?

[appelm]

Originally Posted by jorton

What server hardware and network setup do you have?

ran a specs program and got:

Operating System
Windows XP Professional Service Pack 3 (build 2600)
Install Language: English (United States)
System Locale: English (United States)
Installed: 1/23/2007 7:49:59 PM
Processor a
2.80 gigahertz Intel Core i7 860
64 kilobyte primary memory cache
256 kilobyte secondary memory cache
8192 kilobyte tertiary memory cache
64-bit ready
Multi-core (4 total)
Hyper-threaded (8 total)
Drives
13502.66 Gigabytes Usable Hard Drive Capacity
4429.12 Gigabytes Hard Drive Free Space


Main Circuit Board b
Board: ASUSTeK Computer INC. P7P55D DELUXE Rev 1.xx
Serial Number: 101507740001191
Bus Clock: 133 megahertz
BIOS: American Megatrends Inc. 0504 08/24/2009
Memory Modules c,d
3062 Megabytes Usable Installed Memory

Slot 'DIMM0' has 2048 MB
Slot 'DIMM1' has 2048 MB
Slot 'DIMM2' has 2048 MB
Slot 'DIMM3' has 2048 MB


I don't get that... why do I only have 3062MB? perhaps there's a memory problem? system works well otherwise.

Its a GB lan. Dlink router.

[BobPhoenix]

Originally Posted by appelm

ran a specs program and got:

Operating System
Windows XP Professional Service Pack 3 (build 2600)
Install Language: English (United States)
System Locale: English (United States)
Installed: 1/23/2007 7:49:59 PM
Processor a
2.80 gigahertz Intel Core i7 860
64 kilobyte primary memory cache
256 kilobyte secondary memory cache
8192 kilobyte tertiary memory cache
64-bit ready
Multi-core (4 total)
Hyper-threaded (8 total)
Drives
13502.66 Gigabytes Usable Hard Drive Capacity
4429.12 Gigabytes Hard Drive Free Space


Main Circuit Board b
Board: ASUSTeK Computer INC. P7P55D DELUXE Rev 1.xx
Serial Number: 101507740001191
Bus Clock: 133 megahertz
BIOS: American Megatrends Inc. 0504 08/24/2009
Memory Modules c,d
3062 Megabytes Usable Installed Memory

Slot 'DIMM0' has 2048 MB
Slot 'DIMM1' has 2048 MB
Slot 'DIMM2' has 2048 MB
Slot 'DIMM3' has 2048 MB


I don't get that... why do I only have 3062MB? perhaps there's a memory problem? system works well otherwise.

Its a GB lan. Dlink router.

Because Windows XP 32 bit (or any 32 bit Windows OS for that matter) only recognizes 4GB max memory and reserves approximately 1GB of address space for devices. So you get just a little more than 3GB recognizable memory. If you installed a 64 bit OS you would be able to use the whole 8 GB of memory. Note a 32bit OS can still use > 3GB of memory if it uses PAE and swaps > 4GB memory in and out of the < 4GB address space of the 32 bit OS.

[appelm]

Originally Posted by BobPhoenix

Because Windows XP 32 bit (or any 32 bit Windows OS for that matter) only recognizes 4GB max memory and reserves approximately 1GB of address space for devices. So you get just a little more than 3GB recognizable memory. If you installed a 64 bit OS you would be able to use the whole 8 GB of memory. Note a 32bit OS can still use > 3GB of memory if it uses PAE and swaps > 4GB memory in and out of the < 4GB address space of the 32 bit OS.

ah got it.. thanks for the detailed answer.. interesting. so its not memory related. are my performance issues with hd200 and hd100 unique?

[jorton]

Is the Sagetv java heap on the server set to 1024MB (400Hex)?

[appelm]

Originally Posted by jorton

Is the Sagetv java heap on the server set to 1024MB (400Hex)?

Yes. Just re-checked.

[jorton]

Not sure what to suggest then. Definitely using the fanart options in the TV views and Gemstone flows or using things like the live weather backgrounds on the main menu will slow things down on an HD100/200 vs an HD300. I am not sure that any of us working on Gemstone have an HD100/200 to even test but we do try to keep things lean so that it is usable on older hardware. I know that jusjoken spent a lot of time trying to optimize the caching of images to allow fanart to work better awhile ago.

We have also made some theme file optimizations dropping the total theme file size from 25MB to about 7MB and that will be in the next release so that may help speed things up as the images that have to be loaded into memory are a lot smaller now.

Unfortunately, I think it's just a reality that all of the fanart bling will have some effect on the older extender's speed.