Author Topic: RAM usage / MythTv so slow !  (Read 3553 times)

chris33f

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RAM usage / MythTv so slow !
« on: September 20, 2007, 10:18:25 am »
Hello,
I am very surprized that my freshly installed LMCE is so slow when using MythTV.
My PC :
P4 3GHz HT
RAM 1G
Video Nvidia Geforce 2
TV Pinnacle PCTV Rave PCI


When going the system tab of mythtv is says :
RAM 1010MB total, 979MB used

And nothing is running, no tv display, no video playback, no mp3 playing....

Again when I want to navigate in the menus to configure mythtv it takes ages and pauses sometimes more than 30sec. !!!
But if I press ALT-F2 the kubuntu menus go ok.

Is there any performance issue with MythTV ?

darrenmason

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Re: RAM usage / MythTv so slow !
« Reply #1 on: September 21, 2007, 02:07:17 am »
Eveything should be fine except your video card - Is it really a GeForce 2 - Aren't they very old now. Maybe that is the cause of your problems, but it would just be a guess.
My memory usage is about the same  on the dedicated core but it doesn't seem to grow much or use the swap much (I also have 1GB in it)

eloy

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Re: RAM usage / MythTv so slow !
« Reply #2 on: September 21, 2007, 04:14:23 am »
I don't know how MythTV is reporting memory usage but it is normal to see almost all memory being used since the kernel uses the principle of "no used memory is wasted memory", so it uses memory not used by application as a cache for files on disk.

To get an accurate account of memory usage log into the machine and run the "free" command - that'll tell you how much is being used for file caching.

chris33f

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Re: RAM usage / MythTv so slow !
« Reply #3 on: September 21, 2007, 10:57:26 am »
Well it was a mistake it's a geforce 4 : it's not really powerful, but should be enough to display Linux

My PC :
P4 3GHz HT
RAM 1G
Video Nvidia Geforce 4
TV Pinnacle PCTV Rave PCI

I don't mind it uses all memory, the fact is that MythTV makes large pauses when trying to configure it, and this is not normal, since kubuntu is responding ok at the same time....

eloy

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Re: RAM usage / MythTv so slow !
« Reply #4 on: September 21, 2007, 05:54:09 pm »
chris33f, I forgot to mention that it is not bad that the kernel is using a lot of memory to cache files - if an application needs more memory the kernel will provide it from memory being used to cache files if there is no free memory.

Regarding your performance problem with Myth, have you checked the log files? I'd start by taking a look at /var/log/mythtv/.

Eloy.-