Hi all... I recently installed a fresh install of R5.5. After getting everything setup, I noticed that sometimes when I was watching LiveTV or listening to music (haven't tried anything recorded yet), every now and then the machine seemed like it would totally hang for a second--the music/sound would stop, and the screen would lose all signal. Not just go black mind you, but lose all signal from the card it appears--my TV would pop up with the input screen and ask me if I wanted to change inputs like it does if it loses signal, but then after about 5 seconds, everything comes back on and it goes about it's merry way.

This has happened three times so far. It's always gone right away, but it's pretty frustrating when you're in the middle of something and this happens.

Any ideas? Any logfiles I can post that might make this easier?

Look at the rrd issue in tjc's "R5.5 Hints" post:

http://knoppmyth.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=18453

_________________
ASUS AT3N7A-I (Atom 330)
TBS 8922 PCI (DVB-S2)

Thanks, I'll look into that and give it a shot. I do know that I have RRD enabled, and have noticed it running in my syslog file.

Do you think that would cause the machine to "pause" like that, going so far as to even shut off output from the video card for a few seconds? I'm really somewhat puzzled as to what could be causing this... It's more than just a stutter, it's almost like the machine totally died, but then cuts back on 5 or so seconds later with no issues--and it's not a reboot either, it picks back up wherever it was in the program, song, etc. Odd.

I had the same symptoms as you. Almost complete freeze up for a couple of seconds every 5 mins when rrd ran. The problem can easily be reproduced by running mbmon from the command line.

The only way I could resolve the problem was to remove MBTemp and MBFan from rrd.

_________________
ASUS AT3N7A-I (Atom 330)
TBS 8922 PCI (DVB-S2)

OK. I've got the MBFan and MBTemp disabled already, but I'll try shutting RRD off altogether and see if that fixes it.

Thanks!

Those two are the only ones that we're aware of which cause an issue. If you find something else please let us know.

OK, well this problem has resurfaced with a vengeance. I haven't noticed it while watching recorded programs or live TV, but it happens quite frequently while listening to music, and I'm about 90% sure it's not RRD. Here's what I know:

--Machine locks while playing music. No sound. Processor is ramping up to 100%, which I know because I can hear the CPU fan spin up to its faster speed.
--Happens at random time periods. Sometimes it's 10 seconds in between, sometimes its 10 minutes. This leads me to believe it's not RRD. That, and the fact that I ran the RRD setup script again and disabled it just to be sure, and it's still doing it.
--Machine doesn't have any jobs queued up (mythfilldatabase, encoding, commercial flagging, etc)
--I started up top and watched it until it happened again. When it did happen, top locked up and stopped updating until the machine cleared up again, and when it did, Xorg was at almost 100% for just a second until it disappeared back into its normal range.
--I tried getting rid of the intense visualizations to see if this affected it; there was no effect.

Any ideas? This is driving me insane.

There was a problem with certain visualizations. It sounds like you've got that covered, but try setting it to blank just to make sure that's not involved.

My big suspect would be the Nvidia UseEvents complex. if you're using an Nvidia card, make sure that you don't have an xorg.conf in the /home/mythtv directory and then make sure that the one in /etc/X11/xorg.conf has all the stuff suggested in the R5.5 Hints under Known Issue # 2.3.3 and the pages/threads it links to. Most people are better off leaving NVAGP float to the default value, which is why the scripts leave it commented out, but for others setting it to a specific speed helps.

Also be aware that the OpenGL stuff causes problems with certain "older" Nvidia video chips, including my FX5200. (It should work but there seems to be a driver bug of some kind.) If you're having any hint of video problems I recommend turning off all the OpenGL rendering options. In my book "working" beats "choking on the eye candy" hands down.

Oh, and your hardware details would help...