What amount of RAM are most using ? I have 256mb DDR in my mythbox
but have suffered from random frontend crashes (esp with the RETRO theme)...

was wondering is this likely to be RAM related - anyone think adding another 256mb would make any diff ?

I have also discovered i can make the Frontend crash semi reliably (!) by using the visual search (ff/rewind) for a about 15 seconds... is this likely to be memory related ?

D

Boot from the CD using 'memtest' to test your RAM.

_________________
cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!

ok will do - i take it that 256mb is adequate then?? Will another 256 make any diff to speed or stability.


--
D

Yes, 256 is fine.

_________________
cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!

I actually think the RAM depends on what you are doing. On my home box (R4V4, two DVB cards, recording SD, outputting 1280x768) where 32MB is used by the shared video RAM:

* 256MB is marginal. Booting the box, top shows:
Recording two programmes while playing back another recording does:

* Trying to do other stuff, like using the mythburn scripts to master DVDs, results in paging/swapping, and some skipping of playback. Bumping the RAM up to 512MB eliminates this problem

_________________
| Nigel Pearson, nigel.pearson.au@gmail.com
| "Things you own end up owning you" - Tyler, Fight Club

Speaking of RAM, I started out with 1GB of RAM about a year ago and average memory usage was around 60-70%, but now MythFrontEnd is getting sluggish and I see that my memory usage is always pegged close to 100%. I'm assuming that the memory usage increase over time has something to do with the increasing size of the mythconverg database.

"ps v -A" shows memory usage as follows; seems like apache is using quite a bit as well:
PID TTY STAT TIME MAJFL TRS DRS RSS %MEM COMMAND
2839 ? S 0:06 1 249 140430 4168 0.4 /usr/sbin/apache
2841 ? S 0:01 2 249 155526 16908 1.6 /usr/sbin/apache
2842 ? S 0:03 3 249 152446 13920 1.3 /usr/sbin/apache
2843 ? S 0:00 1 249 140698 4568 0.4 /usr/sbin/apache
2844 ? S 0:06 0 249 154662 16136 1.5 /usr/sbin/apache
2845 ? S 0:00 14 249 140562 4484 0.4 /usr/sbin/apache
3643 ? S 0:00 0 628 2003 1272 0.1 /bin/sh /usr/bin/mysqld_safe
3679 ? S<l 13:32 42 3811 65812 28360 2.7 /usr/sbin/mysqld --basedir=/usr --datadir=/var/lib/mysql --user=mysql --pid-file=/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.pid --skip-locking --port=3306 --socket=/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock
3680 ? S 0:00 0 5 1562 504 0.0 logger -p daemon.err -t mysqld_safe -i -t mysqld
3715 ? Ss 0:00 0 274 3269 1508 0.1 /usr/sbin/sshd
3723 ? Ssl 135:39 27 511 216684 30040 2.9 /usr/bin/mythbackend --daemon --logfile /var/log/mythtv/mythbackend.log --pidfile /var/run/mythtv/mythbackend.pid
4164 ? Ss 0:00 1 994 7477 6380 0.6 /usr/bin/perl /usr/share/webmin/miniserv.pl /etc/webmin/miniserv.conf
4901 ? Ss 0:00 0 249 8746 2320 0.2 /usr/bin/gdm
4913 tty2 Ss+ 0:00 0 10
5279 ? S 0:00 3 249 140722 4544 0.4 /usr/sbin/apache
6099 ? S 0:03 28 249 156450 17968 1.7 /usr/sbin/apache
8393 ? S 0:00 2 50 3737 2216 0.2 /usr/lib/gconf2/gconfd-2 9
12838 ? S 0:05 0 249 154870 16340 1.5 /usr/sbin/apache
12839 ? S 0:01 1 249 149334 10792 1.0 /usr/sbin/apache
12840 ? S 0:00 0 249 140562 4272 0.4 /usr/sbin/apache
14858 tty1 Ss+ 0:00 1 10 1569 488 0.0 /sbin/getty 38400 tty1
14865 ? S 0:00 1 249 9082 2740 0.2 /usr/bin/gdm
14874 ? SL 0:18 10 1508 194195 60832 5.8 /usr/X11R6/bin/X :0 -audit 0 -auth /var/lib/gdm/:0.Xauth -nolisten tcp vt7
14916 ? Ss 0:00 4 1014 7381 4088 0.3 x-window-manager
14956 ? Ss 0:00 0 53 3018 920 0.0 /usr/bin/ssh-agent x-window-manager
14958 ? Ssl 0:03 45 1025 145263 81360 7.8 mythfrontend
15049 ? Sl 0:19 110 13800 77643 29256 2.8
(Ignore Firefox which is listed cuz that's what I'm using to enter this post:)
/usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/firefox-bin -a firefox -z 95 http://www.mysettopbox.tv
15076 ? Ss 0:00 0 228 5251 2648 0.2 xterm
15077 ttyp0 Ss 0:00 1 628 2067 1440 0.1 sh
15082 ttyp0 R+ 0:00 0 63 2312 704 0.0 ps v -A

Looks like I'm going to have to bump it up to 1.5 or 2GB unless somebody has some ideas... (It probably doesn't help that I have about 200 channels and 3 tuner cards plus Firewire.)

Thanks!

I've used 512Mb from day one and always found that to be plenty. The only thing where you might want more is very demanding HDTV. Many folks do fine with 256Mb

I'm far from a linux expert, but from the output below I am assuming that most of my 1GB is being used by the file system cache, and any sluggishness that I'm recently experiencing in MythFrontEnd is probably due to the inability to fit "everything" in cache. I mean I guess it's good that there's not more "free" memory since "free" memory is memory that's being wasted, right?

> free -l
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 1034132 997472 36660 0 4480 646940
Low: 903124 866604 36520
High: 131008 130868 140
-/+ buffers/cache: 346052 688080
Swap: 594396 8 594388

> cat /proc/meminfo
MemTotal: 1034132 kB
MemFree: 14076 kB
Buffers: 55716 kB
Cached: 606792 kB
SwapCached: 0 kB
Active: 626328 kB
Inactive: 316616 kB
HighTotal: 131008 kB
HighFree: 140 kB
LowTotal: 903124 kB
LowFree: 13936 kB
SwapTotal: 594396 kB
SwapFree: 594388 kB
Dirty: 228 kB
Writeback: 0 kB
Mapped: 312676 kB
Slab: 52232 kB
CommitLimit: 1111460 kB
Committed_AS: 613768 kB
PageTables: 1596 kB
VmallocTotal: 114680 kB
VmallocUsed: 80284 kB
VmallocChunk: 30708 kB
HugePages_Total: 0
HugePages_Free: 0
Hugepagesize: 4096 kB

Linux has generally tried to maximize it's memory usage. As a result, unless a box has recently been rebooted, you should expect to see most of the memory in use. Much of it is volatile disk buffers however and not stuff that is going to get swapped if something else comes along.