Five days of Bliss

[dragon]

I was having a significant stuttering problem. I finally solved it after running in a window and having XP's performance monitor running at the same time.

My problem was that XP was paging huge quantities of information. This typically happened while I was watching one already-recorded show, while the recording of another show was finishing..

As a last ditch effort, I pulled a 512MB stick of SDRAM from another machine and put it n my HTPC. With 1024 MB RAM, the stuttering problem has gone away for over a month -- presumably, permanently. Knock on wood.

Terry

[jptaz]

My problem appears to be less of a stutter, but, more of a noticable pause ( 5 to 10 seconds ).

Was your stutterinng like this?

My system shows SageTV with Millions of Page Faults. It seems odd that this would be the case when ther is 178MB free phusical memory according to taskmanager.

[dragon]

My bad. I get some short video stuttering when I starrt a client on my notebook while watching SageTV on the big screen.

Yes, I was getting a pause in which nothing would respond. It typically lasted 5-10 seconds and then everything was all fine.

The issue was WinXP swapping memory to the Page File. With 512MB memory, this was a surprise. But, remember, we're working with files of 1-4 GB.

That's a lot different than "millions of Page Faults." How are these showing up? Page faults are program errors and are identified by Windows as critical errors. They outhg to be interrupting or terminating SageTV, if that's what you're having.

Terry

[jptaz]

Actually a Page Fault is when a program needs to access memory that has been paged to disk. This is not a critical error. In fact it is a normal occurance. A page fault means that the OS needs to read memory back into memory that was written to disk. Depending available Physical memory it may also need to Page other memory to disk before it can read page into physical memory.

A Page Fault is not inherently bad, but it can cause things to slow down if they happen at a time critical moment. There are sveral ways to reduce Page faults.

One an Application can Lock More memory - This tells the OS that I do not want you to Page this chunk of my memory to disk ever.

Another Approach is to add more memory so that the OS will not be likely to page memory as much.

To see Page Faults go to the task manager in XP (same in NT and 2K) and in the "View" Menu go to "Select Columms..." In the dialog box check "Page Faults".

I suspect that the issue is not Page Faults. I could be wrong, but these happen all the time.

John

[dragon]

OK. I took to mean you were having page fault errors, which would be an entirely different issue.

Both our delays were for memory paging to & from virtual memory. Adding a second stick of 512MB SDRAM solved it for me.

I suspect that Java may not be grabbing as much memory as is available for the Java Heap. Perhaps it's limited, perhaps it's a bug, or perhaps that's not the issue. However, when I check the JVM Heap Size (via SageTV/Setup/System Information), I've never seen it over 90 MB total, even when I have 1 GB RAM on a dedicated HTPC..

Terry

[jptaz]

Originally posted by dragon
My bad. I get some short video stuttering when I starrt a client on my notebook while watching SageTV on the big screen.

How short is your video Stuttering? I am not opposed to throwing 512MB more into my server, but I am not entirely sold that it is going to solve my issues since I have 2 Clients that are used regularly.

John

[jptaz]

Originally posted by falchulk
jptaz, with v2 I have had the same stutter when coming out of standby that you seem to be hinting at. It seems to only happen when sagewake or jman's wake utility (what I use) brings it out of standby to record. If it is awakend maunally its fine. It's a very strange problem. You can get rid of the stuttering by closing and restarting sage. Not just a power off but actually closing and restarting.

I have SageWake close SageTV before going into standby and then it restarts it on wake. My issues actually happen more often after the system has been running for a while and in the middle of watching a recorded show...Typcially at the same time a active recording is starting or stopping, but sometimes for no apparent reason.

[dragon]

The video stuttering is on the TV using the dedicated HTPC. It only lasts about 3-5 seconds and only occurs when my notebook client is at a certain point in startup, with the welcome menu on the screen. The status bar at the bottom of the SageTV welcome screen says "Done loading Object DB information" -- which it has for about 10 seconds before the video stuttering starts. After 3-5 seconds, the stuttering stops and the welcome screen's status bar goes through more steps, and the Main Menu shows up.

There is no audio stuttering, only video that is jumpy. There is no effect on shows being recorded at the time.

I don't know if RAM will affect it at all. Probably a faster processor would. The RAM solved my 5-10 second pause problem.

Terry

[dragon]

Originally posted by jptaz
My issues actually happen more often after the system has been running for a while and in the middle of watching a recorded show...Typcially at the same time a active recording is starting or stopping, but sometimes for no apparent reason.

That's the problem I solved with additional memory.

Terry

[jptaz]

Thanks Terry,

I don't Seem to get the Stuttering when my Client Starts up any more. I think changing the Schedule Look Ahead from 14 Days back to the default 3 Days solved this for me....I think this is an issue of all that data being sent to the client on start up. I thought my occasional pauses were caused by this as well, but it seems that it is a memory issue since you have elimnated it with 1GB memory.

...off to Crucial for more memory

John

[jptaz]

Ok... I downloaded HD Tach and tested my hard drive performance. For some reason 3 of my drives are running in DMA mode 2. So I am getting burst rate transfers of 16.5MB and Avg Reads of 16.5MB. My 4 drives on the integrated Promise controls are running at Burst transfers of 75MB and Averages of 40MB. For Now I have moved my page file to one of the 4 faster drives, but it appears that I need to update my VIA chipset Drivers to all the primary IDE controls to go faster than DMA Mode 2. This would explain why after a while of high paging I get pauses...16MB is just too slow...I starting tracking what drive files were on when it paused and it appears they were always on one of the slower drives.

Hopefully the Driver will force the Drives into the correct DMA modes so I will no Longer have this problem.

John

[insomniac]

Sounds closer and closer to my scenerio

Originally posted by jptaz
Ok... I downloaded HD Tach and tested my hard drive performance. For some reason 3 of my drives are running in DMA mode 2. So I am getting burst rate transfers of 16.5MB and Avg Reads of 16.5MB. My 4 drives on the integrated Promise controls are running at Burst transfers of 75MB and Averages of 40MB. For Now I have moved my page file to one of the 4 faster drives, but it appears that I need to update my VIA chipset Drivers to all the primary IDE controls to go faster than DMA Mode 2. This would explain why after a while of high paging I get pauses...16MB is just too slow...I starting tracking what drive files were on when it paused and it appears they were always on one of the slower drives.

Hopefully the Driver will force the Drives into the correct DMA modes so I will no Longer have this problem.

John

[jptaz]

Well after messing with drivers for a while I realized that for some reason my BIOS was actually runing my Drives in PIO mode. I could not find any setting s that directly impacted it, but I tried the "Load Optimized Defaults" in the BIOS and now my Drives are using DMA 6. My worst drive is now burst of 54MB and Average of 30, while my 120GB drive is Burst at 118MB and Average of 48MB.

I think all my Pausing should be gone now...I hope

Now I just wish I could figure out why I can't flash my BIOS to the latest level.