My low end system use to work for about a month before having any issues, but lately after about a week the system will start to studder duing playback, regardless of it is doing anything else or not. A reboot solves the issue, but of course this is annoying.

Is there a way to schedule a reboot every few days or once a week to happen automatically? Sorry, not super familiar with Linux.

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- Andy
Tier2: http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=5826
PHP Book -- PHP Reference: Beginner to Intermediate PHP5

Instead of the "Windows" fix, why not try and find out why the system is acting the way it is? Since the system wasn't acting this way a month ago, what has changed were made in between?

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cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!

indeed generally the only reason for a box to perform any differently after time is a memory leak, and if one of the programs has a memory leak we need to find out which one so someone might be able to fix it.

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Have a question search the forum and have a look at the KnoppMythWiki.

Xsecrets

I was having the same problem. My box would freeze up every couple of days with no error message in any log file. Adventually it started freezing up every day and some times twice in the same day. The lock ups were usally proceded by one or two one second pauses durring playback.

I started running top from a ssh login 24/7 so I could see what was happening exactly when it crashed. The only thing I ever came up with was RAM memory was 99% in use (hard to use 2Gigs of ram I think). Though if I added up all the processes listed by top or 'ps aux' I only found 12-14% of memory in use. (I guess this is how linux is suppost to report free memory though.) Also the swap partition was always 100% free.

Last saturday I reformated the drive and installed R5A26. It has been fine for about 60 hours without a reboot. I've noticed the memory ussage over hours increases to 97-99%. Then will adventually drop to arround 60%. Before increasing agian. when it was freezing before I never saw the memory ussage drop. Perhapse it was locking up when it tried to free memory? Though the swap partition is still never used.

Linux memor handling can be a bit confusing. If I understand right it really tries to always use all RAM. RAM not used by processes is used for buffering (disk cache). But of course it does not make sense to use swap for buffering, so when processes need more RAM it will start by freeing buffers down to a limit before it starts using swap.

I guess a lot of disk acitivity will increase buffer usage, and when disks are idle buffers will be freed.

Okay I figured the extra RAM was being uses for a disk cache, just didn't know it was called a buffer by linux. I thought the buffers line reported by 'free' was like the old buffers used when calling subroutines in MS-DOS.

So when I run 'free' the used RAM minus the buffer memory should produce the amount of used memory I calculate from adding up entries from 'ps aux'?

Since my install and posting to the TIER 2 section of the forums, I've changed nothing to my Knoppmyth box. Since the 80GB Maxtor was one that was recovered (tested good with Powermax) with Spinrite, I ran Spinrite again and it is clean as a whistle.
THe system is 633Mhz Celeron with 256MB of RAM that is always in full use according to KnoppMyth - System Status.

It is just getting more use now than ever, because I send over vidcasts I download on my PC through samba to the video folder to view as well as whatever it pulls through the PVR-250...

Since this is the only issue I've had with it, and loved it otherwise, I haven't wanted to upgrade it to R5A26 and spend a weekend getting it all up again. The next 'upgrade' I'd do would be when Vidcast pulldown through RSS gets integrated (getting iPodder Lemon on looks to be a chore, thanks to the long thread on this forum).

Unlike ryanpatterson, It's not freezing up/locking up (it has only done that twice because of what seemed to be a corrupt 1second on a saved file), but stuttering like crazy, with a reboot the only way to 'fix' it. If someone has some input on what I cna turn on to figure out what the cause would be, I'd be happy to try it.

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- Andy
Tier2: http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=5826
PHP Book -- PHP Reference: Beginner to Intermediate PHP5

Have you tried disabling commerical detection?

I haven't, but not sure why that would affect anything, because the problem occurs midway through PLAYBACK of a stored show, at variable times with no distinguishable trigger.

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- Andy
Tier2: http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=5826
PHP Book -- PHP Reference: Beginner to Intermediate PHP5

Completion of another recording. Remember on a system with multiple asynchronous events you often have to look at seeningly unrelated things. This is one that's known to give people trouble like this. Glitches, hangs, ...

On the other hand don't forget to look into the chipset related issues I was just discussing with someone else. The "C1 Disconnect" issue drove me bat s**t for about 3-4 weeks before I finally nailed it down. The fix is easy if you know about it.