Hi all,

I have just upgraded my R5D1 combined BE/FE box (previously upgraded a few times from an original R4 something install) to R5.5, and it all went pretty smoothly, with my remote being the only major thing that isn’t working right anymore.

So firstly, thanks to everyone involved with this release!

However, I am getting some strange pausing happening every 5 minutes that causes tv playback to stutter. It also affects mp3 playback, or even just moving the cursor around in an xterm window.

Dues to the fact it seems to happen consistently every 5 minutes, I am guessing there must be some process configured to do or check something at this interval, but I am not sure how to track down what this might be.

Does anyone have any ideas as to what might be causing this, or how to track it down? My apologies if this has already been mentioned before, I have tried to search, but didn’t come up with anything obvious.

Many thanks for your help.

http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=18453

See section 4.1 on tweaking RRD.

If you disable or edit your RRD settings, you'll probably be able to fix this issue.

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Good work s1148625, that's almost certainly the cause. Rerunning /usr/local/bin/rrd_Configure.sh an easy way to change which scripts are run. Turn off the ones indicated in the R5.5 Hints and see if that fixes the problem.

The basic issue is an upstream behavior change in mbmon which makes it use a _lot_ more CPU cycles while probing the hardware when it's run on some motherboards. You might be able to fix this by changing the command line options (man mbmon) in /etc/rrd.config based on your hardware, but nobody with sufficient debugging-fu has experienced the problem and dug into this. In summary use mbmon -d to determine what method it picks and then restrict it to only do that.

Here is an example:

It's using the ISA (-I) method and the winbond chips (-p winbond), so lets try that:

Much quicker! So I would change the lines in /etc/rrd.config that say:

to read:

Remember!!! This will depend on which method and chipset it finds when run with "-d", so don't blindly copy this and complain that it doesn't work on your hardware or I'll have some rather unflattering things to say about your cluefulness and ability to follow directions.

(OBTW - I actually repeated the timing experiment enough times to have good statistical confidence that there was a real difference... )

Thanks guys, this is definately the problem. I guess I should have thought of this since it said it may not work on some systems duringthe upgrade, but I just enabled it anyway!

For now I have run the configure script to unselect the MBtemp and MBfan entries which seems to have stopped it.

Timing the mbmon debug call gives the following results, which is just a bit longer than tjc's


From this I guess I need to use the -S option for the access method, but I am not sure what -p option to pick! man mbmon suggests the following options:


Any idea what option maps to the asus one? Or is the problem that there isnt an optmised option for this chip?

Thanks again for your help. I can live without this monitoring if I have to

Even just using "-S" without the chip specified may speed it up considerably. Hmm... Their README claims that "-p winbond" is the right option to use for that. Bizarro...

http://www.nt.phys.kyushu-u.ac.jp/shimizu/download/xmbmon/README-xmbmon201.html

Thanks for looking that up, but unfortunately it doesn't seem to have helped. I had tried with just the -S option before without success, and using both settings gives:

So I guess I will just have to live without this monitoring.

Thanks for your extremely quick and helpful responses though!

One more thing to try, prefix the command in /etc/rrd.config with "nice". e.g.

There is a small chance that this may be enough to keep it from interfering...

No, unfortunately this still causes pausing in video playback.

Just for completeness, this motherboard is an ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe.

Cheers

OK, even weirder idea. Try forcing it to use another access method since somethings the chips can be reached more than one way... The lm_sensors docs maybe helpful on this point... E.g.

Ok, so I have tried the four different options for the access methods. -V and -I dont seem to work, as without the -d option they dont provide any details.
-A seems to work as well as -S, but unfortunately doesnt seem to be any quicker:

I think this makes sense, as the A option just means try all of them if I am reading the man page right.

Any other left field ideas?

Sorry, bottom of the well here... You might try lm_sensors but that needs custom rrd scripts and I think the problems may be fundamental to the way ASUS implemented their monitoring chip...

No problem. I've lived without this stuff for the past 4 years, so I think I can cope

Thanks again for your help.

"mbmon -d" told me I had a winbond chip and this
(-I -p winbond) fixed the issue for me.

Went from 0.9 to 0.003 CPU.

Cliff