Sluggishness normal after recording?

[zebra14]

I have been looking thru the message threads and found this one which touches on memory issues: http://forums.nextpvr.com/showthread.php?t=13357

My question: Is it normal to have the PC act lethargic after a few recording sessions? When I say sluggish, I mean when I click on a program like IE or the main GB-PVR icon, it can take 5-15 seconds to lauch. After a reboot, all programs lauch quickly, within 2-3 seconds - it just appears that after recording, the machine bogs down. It's not a hardware issue that I can tell.

I originally had my PVR box running XP Pro on a Sempron 2800 64 (socket 754) with a Epox EP-8KDA3J w/ 1.5 gigs of RAM with a 250GB 16MB cache Maxtor storage PATA IDE drive. The OS was running on it's own 80GB 8MB PATA drive.

Thinking the lack of L2 cache (256KB) might be an issue, I bought a new P4 motherboard and a new Prescott 2.4Ghz socket 478 CPU which has a 1MB L2 cache. I also popped in a 36GB SATA Raptor as a boot drive, keeping the 250GB 16MB cache Maxtor as a storage drive. I dropped the RAM to 512MB and overall the machine was quite a bit more responsive than the Sempron after first boot.

Then I noticied it too started bogging down and getting lethargic after recording some shows. It's not negatively affecting the PVR machine's ability to do it's job - it just bugs me that fairly powerful machines are acting lethargic after recording some videos.

CPU utilization is around 35-40% when recording, around 5% or less on playback, and memory useage is ~300-350MB out of 512 total.

Any tips other than a periodic reboot or some cacheman type approach? Or is this just the nature of GB-PVR along with .dotnet?

========
Curent rig:
ASUS P4S800D-X, Intel Pentium 4 2.4A Prescott 533MHz, 512MB DDR400 RAM (dual DDR), 36 GB WD Raptor boot drive, 250GB Maxtor 16MB cache storage drive, Windows XP Pro, ATI 9700 Pro Video, ADI AD1888 onboard sound, Hauppauge PVR-150

[jksmurf]

I can't help you with your problem, but was curious whether you also noticed this in previous GBPVR versions?

I ask as I have a pretty low spec system and was thinking along the same line as you, bite the bullet and get a new MB, CPU etc etc. The thing is the system actually worked fine on the PC (never any probs with the MVP, funnily enough) until recently when it became very sluggish starting GBPVR, changing channels etc.

k.

[zebra14]

Thanks for the comments - guess as long as it's working, I should enjoy the show! After all, the machine's primary purpose is to record TV, not to surf the net or play games. More RAM did not appear to help when I had 1.5GB of RAM when the Sempron 2800 64 was inside. That's why I dropped it to 512MB as it made no difference. I am wondering if I pop in a Athlon 3000 64 (changing the mobo again back to the Epox) if that would help, but i kinda doubt it.

[Digital712]

I have been looking thru the message threads and found this one which touches on memory issues: http://forums.nextpvr.com/showthread.php?t=13357

My question: Is it normal to have the PC act lethargic after a few recording sessions? When I say sluggish, I mean when I click on a program like IE or the main GB-PVR icon, it can take 5-15 seconds to lauch. After a reboot, all programs lauch quickly, within 2-3 seconds - it just appears that after recording, the machine bogs down. It's not a hardware issue that I can tell.

I originally had my PVR box running XP Pro on a Sempron 2800 64 (socket 754) with a Epox EP-8KDA3J w/ 1.5 gigs of RAM with a 250GB 16MB cache Maxtor storage PATA IDE drive. The OS was running on it's own 80GB 8MB PATA drive.

Thinking the lack of L2 cache (256KB) might be an issue, I bought a new P4 motherboard and a new Prescott 2.4Ghz socket 478 CPU which has a 1MB L2 cache. I also popped in a 36GB SATA Raptor as a boot drive, keeping the 250GB 16MB cache Maxtor as a storage drive. I dropped the RAM to 512MB and overall the machine was quite a bit more responsive than the Sempron after first boot.

Then I noticied it too started bogging down and getting lethargic after recording some shows. It's not negatively affecting the PVR machine's ability to do it's job - it just bugs me that fairly powerful machines are acting lethargic after recording some videos.

CPU utilization is around 35-40% when recording, around 5% or less on playback, and memory useage is ~300-350MB out of 512 total.

Any tips other than a periodic reboot or some cacheman type approach? Or is this just the nature of GB-PVR along with .dotnet?

Probably not a lot of help, my specs are a bit higher, but the whole family uses my box to play games, surf, etc while recording one or two shows and streaming to the mvp and I don't have to reboot but maybe once a week or so. Once in a while I might get a hicup on a recording, just a milisecond skip or pause and thats only been twice I can think of out of hundreds of recordings.

If you know PC's well enough you could get a copy of "hackthis" it lets you see (and disable) nonstandard startup items/services (be careful though). You might also check for spyware etc. Defrag maybe, file system type might have something to do with it I'm using NTFS. It also would seem to me if you killed or restarted the recording service and the system was still laggy it'd probably be something else.

Just throwing stuff out there...

Tony

[Pioneer4x4]

CPU utilization is around 35-40% when recording, around 5% or less on playback, and memory useage is ~300-350MB out of 512 total.

What is CPU AFTER recording? Could it just be comskip running in the background causing your issues? It will max out the cpu on mine, but since it is at low priority, it doesn't affect use of the PC.

[erik]

It does not affect the PC if you disk is very fast and you have enough memory because Comskip uses a lot of memory and does some substantial disk IO

[zebra14]

What is CPU AFTER recording? Could it just be comskip running in the background causing your issues? It will max out the cpu on mine, but since it is at low priority, it doesn't affect use of the PC.

Not using comskip so it's not that... I've learned to live with it. No biggie. Thanks for the input!

[dragonfiregum]

Hate to bump a old thread but this is the problem im now having. After recording trying to watch live tv it takes forever to open and stutters horribly until i restart.
Looking at my cpu during this it shows around 54% , while maxxing the first core and using very little of the second. Trying to figure this out now.
Just having gbpvr open has cpu 1 maxxed and other spiking.
No clue why..

[sub]

Hate to bump a old thread but this is the problem im now having. After recording trying to watch live tv it takes forever to open and stutters horribly until i restart.
Looking at my cpu during this it shows around 54% , while maxxing the first core and using very little of the second. Trying to figure this out now.
Just having gbpvr open has cpu 1 maxxed and other spiking.
No clue why..

I dont know about your specific problem, but I should point out that you need to have <ForceSingleProcessorAffinity>false</ForceSingleProcessorAffinity> in config.xml to let it use both cores.

[dragonfiregum]

]ok that fixxed that portion of the problem but i have another problem. which i just found a thread for.