[mythtvnz] System freezes thrashing HDD

[James Booth]

On Mon, 05 Apr 2010 10:25:22 Aaron Whitehouse wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> I've spent a long time trying to narrow this down, but I'm really 
> struggling and could do with any help/suggestions that you can come up with.
> 
> I have run Mythbuntu for quite a long time. We used 9.10 without too 
> much trouble. After some updates near the beginning of this year, 
> Mythbuntu started stalling for 1-3 minutes at a time, with the hard disk 
> light on solidly and nothing else working. The system would be virtually 
> unresponsive, but would slowly crawl to a terminal etc. Then, after 
> about 1-3 mins, it would be back to normal. I can't see anything that 
> could be causing the problem in top, iotop or the system logs. There are 
> some entries in the logs about different kernel tasks being killed 
> because they didn't start properly in 120 seconds, but I think that is a 
> symptom rather than a cause.
> 
> I have now changed the card to an nVidia and am using the proprietary 
> drivers. I've removed one of the tuner cards. I upgraded the system to 
> Lucid Beta and downloaded all the latest updates. The problem is still 
> occurring, even when all I was doing was browsing folders in Thunar, so 
> that suggests to me that it isn't MythTV causing this (mythbackend is 
> still running, but I haven't loaded in the database or set anything up). 
> To give an idea of the problem, running a 42 minute video in VLC took 53 
> mins with the stalls.  The memory looks okay (I have 2GB in it), with 
> free -m showing most "used", but "cached".
> 
> I haven't yet sorted out all of the VDPAU etc., but I'm guessing that 
> those are unlikely to solve the problem when it stalls the system so 
> much that even a terminal can't work.  Given that it isn't showing in 
> top/iotop, I'm wondering if it is something really low-level. On the 
> other hand, I would have thought it would need to be hardware-specific 
> or everyone would be complaining.
> 
> If anyone can help me, it would make a huge difference -- even if only 
> to suggest more diagnostics or logs to review.
> 
> Thanks in advance,
> 
> Aaron
> 
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I had problems that were kind of simlar to what you describe after I went to 
9.10/0.22 and moved to DVB-T. Turned out to be mythcommflag when processing HD 
files. I could never get it to work without bringing everything down so have 
turned mythcommflag off (sadly).