Hic-ups every 30 secs

[Torque]

I'm using a Geforce 6600 with version 81.98.

Oh... just a thought... I was using 81.98 when i noticed the issue (latest version installed over many previous versions... i just kept upgrading it every few months). Then as I was trying to get the component video out to work, I used the drivers that came on the Gigabyte CD. That actually removed all the drivers first, prompted a reboot, then installed its version. When I decided I'd stick with DVI, I upgraded the drivers back to 81.98 and I hadn't noticed the 30 second hiccup the last couple times I tried TS.

[zaldwaik]

I have always had this issue and I am using FX 5200 card with 78.* drivers. I am going to try to upgrade to the latest drivers and see if that gets resolved.

[Jim_]

video cards?

What hard drives are you guys using?
How big is the cache?
Is ultra DMA and write cache enabled in device manager?
Is there a CD or DVD Rom drive on the same cable?
Is CD auto-insert notify enabled?
Is your liveTV folder on the system drive?
What bitrate are you using for live TV?

If I had the problem I would start by downloading http://www.systeminternals.com “file monitor”, and “HD Tune” from http://www.hdtune.com/

My lowly 1800xp system hits 80% in the spikes but didn’t have any stutter problems. Unless I page through a large text file with notepad at the same time.

[fiteclub]

Jim

We have all pretty much concluded that the problem being addressed in this thread is not due to harddrive speed, cache, RAM, etc.

Sub, I have been away for a while but I will do the timing things if you still think that is useful. Also, my logging setting has always been in "info" mode so that is not it. I get no spikes at all in record mode or while watching a show which is still recording. Also, I will be glad to let you log into my system remotely if you would like. I am behind a NAT router so you will need to help me configure my system to let you in.

As seen below, my video card is a GeForce 6600, nForce drivers 81.95, latest nvidia pure video decoder.

[Jim_]

Hi Bill, I guess I missed the hard file access drive tests…
I'm not an expert but are you guys using outlook or any other programs that use Jet? I disabled outlook every place I found it in my systems.
I see a lot of Jet hits in the registry, and the jet temp file takes a hit about every 30-seconds…

[Kyle]

So am I the only one that sees larger spikes with a larger EPG download ? Emptying the EPG makes my spikes go away completely. Has anybody else that is getting the spikes tried to empty the EPG to see if this has any effect ?

Both of my computers exhibit the same problem, one with an ATI 9800Pro, Athlon 2400XP, and PVR-150, the other with an NVidia 6200, Sempron64 2600, and PVR-150. The size of the spike is directly related to the size of the EPG download. With a completely empty EPG there is no spike at all. Since the EPG is stored in the Access database and it appeared that the size of the EPG contributed to the size of the cpu spike I monitored the file accesses and the spikes exactly correspond to the accessing of the Access database. Consistantly every 30 seconds.

The spikes happen at exactly the same time as the accessing of the Access database. In the log file the times to look at are 2:19:02 - 2:19:03 and 2:19:33 - 2:19:34. In each ~1 second interval there is a combined total of 170 file accesses to gbpvr.mdb and gbpvr.ldb.

Please somebody try to empty the EPG completely and see if the spikes go away.

Thanks,

Kyle

[capone]

Everyone w/ this problem should be compressing their gbpvr.mdb file (either using access or opening/closing the CP). I do 9 days for 50 channels or so, and it compresses down to 4.5Mb.

I know GB only supposed to be reading the file, but Windows is amazingly inefficient w/ normally simple things at times.

[Kyle]

I currently have 4 days worth of EPG with 72 channels. My database size was 3.25 Meg. I compacted it and it went to 2.86 Meg. It wasn't very big before I compacted it and compacting it made little difference. It also didn't change the size of the spike. Is the spike possibly tied to the number of entries in the Programme table. I have a little over 10,000 entries.

Kyle

[ken]

opening/closing the CP

What is CP? Does GB do this automatically?

[capone]

- The CP is the control panel for configuring GB.

- If you already had it that small, then that's not it, obviously. One thing I always suggest in troubleshooting is to disable about everything you know how (on both system and GB plugins) except what you need to watch TS. If it goes away, add things back until it starts again. If that works, Volia.