really long boot - reboot times

[tvmaster2]

lately, my reboot times have gotten extremely long.

my server is setup so no password is needed (W7 32bit), the drive is a small, 90gb SSD with nothing much other than the OS, Sage, and a couple of minor apps that shouldn't be a problem.

the SageTV service auto-reboots with the system. When I rebuilt this six months ago or so, reboots that effected recordings were only taking around one minute, in so much that I would lose one minute of a current recording if the system crashed and rebooted.

Now...it's taking FOUR minutes before my recordings pick up again.

Two, 1gb recording drives, one for my Colossus and one for my HD-PVR.

Is everything purely based on how many recordings are on the drives? Is there any way to streamline reboots? It would appear Sage has to re-read every recording or file EVERY time a reboot happens

[egeller]

How big is your Wiz.bin file?

[nyplayer]

Originally Posted by tvmaster2

lately, my reboot times have gotten extremely long.

my server is setup so no password is needed (W7 32bit), the drive is a small, 90gb SSD with nothing much other than the OS, Sage, and a couple of minor apps that shouldn't be a problem.

the SageTV service auto-reboots with the system. When I rebuilt this six months ago or so, reboots that effected recordings were only taking around one minute, in so much that I would lose one minute of a current recording if the system crashed and rebooted.

Now...it's taking FOUR minutes before my recordings pick up again.

Two, 1gb recording drives, one for my Colossus and one for my HD-PVR.

Is everything purely based on how many recordings are on the drives? Is there any way to streamline reboots? It would appear Sage has to re-read every recording or file EVERY time a reboot happens

You might want to take a look at this thread.
http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/show...8&postcount=40

[MattHelm]

I could have sworn there was another "cleanup" type property, but it was years ago that I used it. When restarting after setting it, there was a LONG boot, after that, things were faster. (software toggle it back off after 1 restart) If I remember correctly, it cleaned out some of the win.biz data. It could have been a 6.x setting only, though, that's how long ago it was. (I started with 7 at beta)

[tvmaster2]

good suggestions...thanks. I'll report back

[tvmaster2]

Originally Posted by egeller

How big is your Wiz.bin file?

27,793kb.

here's a thing: would a failing data drive be cause for longer boot times?

[KryptoNyte]

Absolutely (on the failing hard drive).

[tvmaster2]

Originally Posted by KryptoNyte

Absolutely (on the failing hard drive).

Well then, I think Windows 7 just found my problem
Maybe it's time to try one of those Travelstar 2.5" 1TB 7200 drives....seem to be getting good reviews, and, three year warranties. The Seagate that's apparently failing has two more years warranty left, but maybe some internal heat reduction would be good.

[KryptoNyte]

It's my understanding the Western Digital Red drives are supposed to have some decent life, 3 year warranty. All three of the Western Digital Green drives (2tb) that I purchased a couple years ago to run in RAID-0 failed. WD replaced all three under warranty with 3 more green drives, which I promptly attached to a system and lengthened the head parking cycle (which is allegedly what's causing the failures).

I will say that I've had good success so far with the Seagate 4TB drives, but I haven't had them long enough to see how they will last. They were originally purchased on sale in a Seagate external enclosure and I pulled them out to install in the machine. Transfer speeds on large video files is usually right around 150 megabytes per second, which is fairly respectable.

Ironically, I was able to drop one of the WD 3tb drives right back into the Seagate external enclosure USB 3.0 and it works great for backups.

[tvmaster2]

Day three of replacing a 3.5" Seagate with a 2.5" Travelstar...for data....so far no problems. Boot time has been cut in half - roughly two minutes now.

[tvmaster2]

Originally Posted by nyplayer

You might want to take a look at this thread.
http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/show...8&postcount=40

wow...finally got around to trying this after repairing my failing drive....my boot times reduced from 3:50 to 1:35....and I never used Intelligent Recording in the first place. Great tip...thanks!

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by MattHelm

I could have sworn there was another "cleanup" type property, but it was years ago that I used it.

You mean this one?
http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/show...th*#post523671

[tvmaster2]

what exactly will this "clean-up" to your knowledge?

[stanger89]

Sage normally saves entries in it's database for files it can't access, the idea being if it does a scan and the network is down (or similar) it won't purge all the imported files in case they come back later.

If you've had Sage a long time and moved it (or stuff it imports) around it's possible you could have things in the database that really don't exist but Sage can't get to to verify they're not there.

It's sort of a specialized thing, if all your media is local I wouldn't expect it to do a thing. For me, I've moved stuff around and it helped performance because I had orphan entries and the Comskip plugin would wait for each file access to time out for files that didn't exist.

Oh, if you do try this, make sure all your networked files are available to Sage because it will purge anything it can't find.

Though I wouldn't really expect it to help with startup. The limited_carny_init is what really speeds startup, especially if you've got a lot of history.

I am potentially confused a bit though, you say "reboot" but what exactly are you talking about. Is your PC taking longer to actually reboot, or is it just Sage is taking longer to get to an operating state after a reboot?

[MattHelm]

Originally Posted by stanger89

You mean this one?
http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/show...th*#post523671

That may have been it, but like I said, it was 4 or 5 years ago. BTW, I think I need to run that one, I've moved my drives around a lot just lately. Does that on toggle back to false after a restart?

BTW, how do you do a forum search on "disable_root_path_existence_check"? I've run into this issue when searching for settings before.

[tvmaster2]

Originally Posted by stanger89

I am potentially confused a bit though, you say "reboot" but what exactly are you talking about. Is your PC taking longer to actually reboot, or is it just Sage is taking longer to get to an operating state after a reboot?

I usually reboot my server once a day, just to keep things running well. On said server, I run the SagetvService, and the SageTV GUI pops up on the taskbar.
After either a complete shutdown or reboot, and if there was a recording in progress at the time, it would take nearly four minutes for that recording to pick up again, which is usually the same time it would take for the SageUI icon to show up on the taskbar. The service would start pretty quickly, however.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by MattHelm

That may have been it, but like I said, it was 4 or 5 years ago. BTW, I think I need to run that one, I've moved my drives around a lot just lately. Does that on toggle back to false after a restart?

I believe so.

BTW, how do you do a forum search on "disable_root_path_existence_check"? I've run into this issue when searching for settings before.

I just searched for it and found a couple references.

Originally Posted by tvmaster2

I usually reboot my server once a day, just to keep things running well. On said server, I run the SagetvService, and the SageTV GUI pops up on the taskbar.
After either a complete shutdown or reboot, and if there was a recording in progress at the time, it would take nearly four minutes for that recording to pick up again, which is usually the same time it would take for the SageUI icon to show up on the taskbar. The service would start pretty quickly, however.

Sounds like the limited_carny_init would help, ie that Sage is indexing a lot of history and it takes a while.

[nyplayer]

Originally Posted by tvmaster2

I usually reboot my server once a day, just to keep things running well. On said server, I run the SagetvService, and the SageTV GUI pops up on the taskbar.
After either a complete shutdown or reboot, and if there was a recording in progress at the time, it would take nearly four minutes for that recording to pick up again, which is usually the same time it would take for the SageUI icon to show up on the taskbar. The service would start pretty quickly, however.

Question why do you need to start the GUI? .... So if there is a way you can run without the GUI.. more memory for the Service. I am asking this because I have observed that while the Server is going through the startup routines. Sage UI is also trying to startup and acquire memory...and resources. I am not sure if you still only have 2 gigs of memory or added more but if you have the Java heap set to 1024 both the Service and Ui will try and acquire 1024.

[tvmaster2]

Originally Posted by nyplayer

Question why do you need to start the GUI? .... So if there is a way you can run without the GUI.. more memory for the Service. I am asking this because I have observed that while the Server is going through the startup routines. Sage UI is also trying to startup and acquire memory...and resources. I am not sure if you still only have 2 gigs of memory or added more but if you have the Java heap set to 1024 both the Service and Ui will try and acquire 1024.

ah, first...I do use the server to watch from time to time, as it's in my home office and it would be a waste of an extender. I have my heap set to 1024, but I have 4 gigs of ram running on Win 7, 32 bit (FireWire channel changing), so 3 gig gets accessed. Would reducing the heap down to 760 be a better number, given this scenario?

[nyplayer]

Originally Posted by tvmaster2

ah, first...I do use the server to watch from time to time, as it's in my home office and it would be a waste of an extender. I have my heap set to 1024, but I have 4 gigs of ram running on Win 7, 32 bit (FireWire channel changing), so 3 gig gets accessed. Would reducing the heap down to 760 be a better number, given this scenario?

As a test maybe you can disable the automatic startup of the Sage UI. .. and only start it up when you want to watch something. That is the way I have my server setup. Occasionally I do as you do watch Sage on my server. I manually start Sage UI. another way I used to startup Sage was to use task scheduler to launch Sage UI on a delay.