I have been noticing that when my FE are acting a little slow I go down stairs to where my BE/FE box is and I can hear the hard drives just screaming. But I am not recording or doing anything at the time. Has anyone else seen this or know why?

I am running R5D1 with .19myth


Thanks

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Marty

Long live Myth and Knoppmyth!!!!!

Are you sure they aren't working on commflagging or some such? Running vmstat and/or top during this time should give you some indication of the cause.

My short list of things to look at for non-recording/playback disk activity:
- mythcommflag
- mythfilldatabase
- updatedb (for locate)
I'll second what slowtolearn said about checking with top. The longest running cases I've seen like this were when commercial flagging had gone off the rails for some reason, corrupted recording or whatever, but guessing is no substitute for checking the system.

I will try that command the next time I find it slow. I just started using it to record HD tonight up until now I have just been using to for DVD's and CD's. So I don't think it would have had anything thing to do with the recording features correct?

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Marty

Long live Myth and Knoppmyth!!!!!

On the contrary, I would guess what you are seeing is a direct result of the recording features, assuming we consider commercial flagging a recording feature (I do). Commflagging is enabled by default, I'm going to guess that's what your hard drives are up to... (top would show mythcommflag in it's process list)

Could it also be auto-expiring some large Hi-Def files? I use JFS on my /myth partition because it's faster than Ext3 at deleting large files. There was a long thread on the MythTV mailing list about what the best filesystem is to use on /myth.

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Mike
My Hardware Profile

I see your point. The only thing was that it was happing before I started to use the tuner. My wife said it was slow last week one day. So do you think it was trying to do something with the card even though I was not using it.

Thanks for the idea's

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Marty

Long live Myth and Knoppmyth!!!!!

Then I'm not sure we have enough information. I was under the impression that you noticed the hard drive activity after you had installed and began using the new HDTV tuner, not before. If this is not the case then some more background and your hardware specs (before and after the HDTV card) may shed some light. Did you not have any other tuners in the system before?

Regardless, the next time you experience the slowdown you will want to run top and capture the output, this should tell you what is eating your CPU cycles.

I had in there the PVR-350 card but was not using it took it out and put in te phd3000. My system in close to a Dragon 1.0 specs wise but I am using a 3ware card doing a raid5 setup. I will use the top command next time and see if I can see what is making the hard drive just scream. I was thinking maybe it was a defrag or something like that but maybe that command will show something else.

It is happing right now but doing a top command there is nothing hitting the CPU hard. But the hard drives are just screaming and the system reacts slow getting a list of movies for example. Is there a command that would show drive stat or what processes are using the drives. I am not watching or recording TV right now.

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Marty

Long live Myth and Knoppmyth!!!!!

How much system memory do you have? From your description, your system could be swapping. That might lead to some performance degradation...

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Do you code to live, or live to code?
Search LinHES forum through Google

The system has 1GB of Ram. I have been watching the top command and noticed when it happened tonight the wa was at about 97 - 98%. I don't know alot about the command does that have to do with the hard drive or I/O. Also it looks like what was running at that time was mysql and mythfilldatabase. Does mysql preform a defrag or some kind of maintenance and if so can it be scheduled.


Hopefully this is some more info.

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Marty

Long live Myth and Knoppmyth!!!!!

wa is the time spent waiting for I/O. You mentioned you had a RAID setup, so I doubt you've got a hard drive bottleneck (they've all got DMA on, right?). 97-98% sounds extremely excessive. I just ran an updatedb on my single drive system with top -d 0.1 and it didn't move from 0% wa.

I'm curious as to what you mean by 'screaming' ? Do you mean the hard drives sound like they're seeking constantly (thrashing)? Or does the sound come on when you immediately turn on the PC? If it sounds like a loud high-pitched whine you might have a motor failing on one of the drives.

When I said the drives were screaming I just meant that I could hear them working really hard. I did an updatedb and then also watched top and the wa did spike up to 98%. When you were talking about DMA on you talking about a setting in the card or in knoppmyth?

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Marty

Long live Myth and Knoppmyth!!!!!

Lots of DB activity sure sounds like the daily mythfilldatabase update to me...

It's a KnoppMyth setting. I'm not sure if the raid will make any differences, but the usual way to check if dma is turned on is, as root execute hdparm /dev/hda

Look for the using_dma flag, it should be set to on. If not hdparm -d1 /dev/hda wil turn it on.

Substitute hda for your drive as need be.