Possible VA + Weather plug in bug?

[daphatty]

This is a shot in the dark but here goes.

Over the past several weeks I've noticed a strange behavior occuring while watching recorded video through GB-PVR. Every so often the video I am watching will slow down and then speed up in an effort to resync itself with the audio that kept on going. I've noticed that this occurs roughly every 10 minutes which coincidentally is the time interval I had set for my weather plug-in to update.

The only reason I even suspect the VA and Weather plugins is because I've noticed some rumblings about the VA Panel and resource management. Anyhow, if anyone else out there is using both of these plugins, could you keep an eye out for this?

- DaPhatty

[Jeff]

The downloading of weather updates happens in a background thread. The more locations you monitor, the more resources will be spent downloading and caching the informaiton for those locations. All of this is independent of the VA panel, which won;t be doing anything while you are watching a video. It is only called by GBPVR if you are on the main menu and, if you have it configured as the screen saver, when you are in screen saver mode.

If you are monitoring lots of locations for weather, you might try reducing the number and frequency of the updates. Weatehr doesn't really change all that fast after all.

Jeff

[daphatty]

The downloading of weather updates happens in a background thread. The more locations you monitor, the more resources will be spent downloading and caching the informaiton for those locations. All of this is independent of the VA panel, which won;t be doing anything while you are watching a video. It is only called by GBPVR if you are on the main menu and, if you have it configured as the screen saver, when you are in screen saver mode.

If you are monitoring lots of locations for weather, you might try reducing the number and frequency of the updates. Weatehr doesn't really change all that fast after all.

Jeff

Thanks for the breakdown of how the plugin works. I do have several weather sources configured (four to be exact) and, at the time, I had the weather plugin update every 10 minutes. I've since increased the update interval to 30 minutes. Lets see how that works.

One question though. Assuming multiple configured weather sources does indeed impact system performance, would it be prudent to update the weather sources at staggered intervals (say two at a time at most) rather than do them all at once?

[Jeff]

That would probably be a good idea, but it would of course be extra work as well. An easier thing for me to do might to to only process the next n updates at a time, and just walk through the list in chunks. On my test machine I monitor around 20 sites just so I can check various loctions with different weather types. However, that machine is never used for video playback so I havent; tested how they interact. On my PVR machine I usually only monitor 1 to 3 locations, and that seems to work just fine.

Jeff