[mythtvnz] System freezes thrashing HDD

[Stephen Worthington]

On Mon, 05 Apr 2010 12:58:14 +1200, you wrote:

>Thanks everybody for such helpful and quick responses!
>
>===
>John Russell wrote:
>> Well I'm not a Ubuntu user, but I have in the past has issues with desktop 
>> indexing/search tools like Beagle and Strigi doing similar things on Suse and 
>> Mandriva.  Anything like that running?  
>
>I don't think anything like that should be on a Mythbuntu system. It 
>certainly isn't appearing in top or iotop.
>
>> Have you checked for anything 
>> interesting with dmesg or in /var/log/messages?
>
>There isn't much of interest. In the syslog, I found a bunch of messages 
>saying (see around line 3000):
>"#
>Apr  5 08:07:56 mythbuntu-server init: mythtv-backend main process 
>(1414) terminated with status 254
>#
>Apr  5 08:07:56 mythbuntu-server init: mythtv-backend main process 
>ended, respawning"
>
>What does this status mean? I'm wondering if this problem is just 
>coincidentally similar to my previous problem and this one is just 
>because I haven't yet set up the database.

That happens almost always when I shut down Mythbuntu 9.10.  It seems
to me that there is a bug in mythbackend - it does not respond
correctly to the signal to shut down and keeps restarting, until it
eventually gets killed by the shutdown process.  It does not take very
long for all of this, so you normally only notice if you look at the
logs, or are on the right screen to see it during shutdown.  If it is
happening at any other time than shutdown, it would be a worry, so
check your logs to see.  Fortunately there appears to be no damage to
the database from mythbackend being killed as a result of this bug.  I
have not checked to see if this bug has been reported.  Is anyone else
seeing this?