Intelligent Recording Overload

[Grey_Goose]

I recently added DirecTV, so now my EPG has both cable & DirecTV. With 6 tuners on my system, my system hangs quite a bit on scanning the EPG for IR. Is there any cure for this? Sage is sitting on a Cheetah X15 now, which helped a bit, but not totally.

The WAF is off the scale w/ the stuttering & hangs...

[Jere_Jones]

Try turning IR off. If your system goes back to normal it should be something besides the scheduling since Sage generates the IR schedule whether it's going to record it or not.

There is a line in the sage.properties about a schedule file. You can put a filename in it and it will save the recording schedule. It will include what it would record if IR was on.

That should help determine if it is the EPG scanner or something else.

Jere

[Grey_Goose]

With or without IR, i get the periodic spikes that cause stuttering or freezing...

[Opus4]

If it is related to figuring out the schedule... did you edit the properties to increase the look ahead time for how many days it creates the schedule, or is it still at the default 3 days? Increasing the look ahead time will require more processing. How much of your memory is getting used during all this?

- Andy

[Grey_Goose]

It's not the memory that causes the stuttering; I don't think... with perfmon running, the stuttering coincides with the disk queue going into the 1-3 range. Normal idle is .5. So it's basically the disk just grinding for a few seconds...

Could I decrease the look ahead time, or is 3 the lowest?

[Opus4]

If it could be increased, it could be decreased; it is in the FAQ thread. Is this only happening while multiple recordings are occurring? Maybe the drive throughput with those 6 tuners is simply getting maxed out & the schedule scan is the last straw. Are any recordings being saved to the SageTV disk? (even if it is another partition of the same disk.) How's the fragmentation? That's a SCSI drive, isn't it? You would think SCSI would handle that, so maybe it is going seek crazy? Is it just the drives getting busy, or is the cpu maxed too? Finally: would it be possible to answer your question with any more questions than this in one paragraph?

I'm not promising to come up with an answer, but with more info, perhaps someone will catch something.

- Andy

[Grey_Goose]

No problem

1) It happens regardless of concurrent recordings. I can force it by marking a bunch of stuff as "Don't Like" in the schedule to force it to recalculate IR's, and the result is the same if recording 2 shows or 6 shows...

2) The Sage disk is a standalone disk with only the OS, pagefile, and Sage. It's a Seagate 15K drive which I thought would easily handle it also. Fragmentation is nil, seek/activity is nil unless recalculating.

3) Cpu jumps from around 5-10% to maybe 30-35% during this. It's definitely a disk queue issue.

Two major changes happened to my Sage server in one weekend; first, I added two tuners (from 4 to 6); second, I added DirecTV. These disk spikes/stutters happened after all of this.

Based on the being able to reproduce it by forcing it to recalculate IR's, I think it's definitely an IR issue.

I'll try lowering the look-ahead.


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server set up
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AMD 2700 w/ 512 RAM
36 GB SCSI 15K drive - OS, pagefile, temp files, Sage
250 IDE - Sage recordings
200 IDE - Sage recordings
200 IDE - Sage recordings
200 IDE - Sage recordings
PVR 250 - cable
PVR 250 - cable
PVR 250 - cable
PVR 250 - DirecTV - serial control
PVR USB2 - DirecTV - serial control
PVR USB2 - DirecTV - serial control