Most of the Sunday Morning News was destroyed

[ChaosMageX]

NextPVR V5's Recording Service crashed this morning at around 7:38 AM CST. The NextPVR Service itself kept on running and had to be manually restarted to fix it. I backed up the logs beforehand and I have attached them to this post. I want to know what went wrong and what I can do to prevent this from happening in the future, if anything at all. 

I'm worried Windows 10 might have something to do with it, since I also returned to the computer to see that Windows File Explorer had also seemed to have restarted since I last checked on the computer. Checking the System Log in the Windows Event Viewer, there seems to have been a number of errors related to the Service Control Manager that cropped up around the time that NextPVR failed. I've copied the Events that might be relevant and compiled them inside the WindowsSystemLog-2022-09-11_07h00.txt text file that I have also attached to this post inside of a ZIP file.

Needless to say, as usual, I am absolutely livid, as this is the last thing I should need to have to personally babysit. However, as I've said, I have a sneaking suspicion that Windoze might be at fault for this failure, since NextPVR has actually been relatively well behaved since upgrading from V4 to V5. Still, I want to be absolutely sure, which is why I'm making a forum post. I want to do everything I can to prevent this from happening again, and losing more historical news that I can never get back.

[mvallevand]

It seems to be a low memory issue, you appear to recording every show on multiple channels too, not sure about your use case, but this is extreme use that would never be tested. You will need to monitor the recording service, to see how much it is using and if it is growing suspiciously big.

Martin

[ChaosMageX]

It seems to be a low memory issue,  you appear to recording every show on multiple channels too, not sure about your use case, but this is extreme use that would never be tested.  You will need to monitor the recording service, to see how much it is using and if it is growing suspiciously big.

Martin

If what you say is true, that means that the software has a serious memory leak somewhere.

My computer currently has 16 GB of RAM. You'd think that would be enough, but apparently not. I've been considering doubling it for a while, and this is probably what will put me over the edge.

Still, if it's a memory leak on NextPVR's part, I have a sick feeling that nothing short of infinite RAM would fix this problem in the long run, or at least until the memory leak is plugged.

As for others testing this, it wouldn't exactly be that hard for someone else to test these conditions. All I do is record the weekly Sunday Morning shows on the big six: ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC, PBS, & the CW.
And at the same time, I'm recording off three cable tuners from a standard HDHomeRun Prime unit, usually CNN, MSNBC, and a third network of my choice.

There are affiliates of the big six available in just about every major city in the US, and probably many in Canada too. I would think that it would be relatively easy for many people to replicate the conditions, as long as they have the money to get at least 6 OTA tuners and a HDHomeRun Prime with a CableCard. If a CableCard subscription is too hard to procure these days, then the additional strain could probably be replicated with just 3 more OTA tuners recording independent / alternative language channels.

As for exterior conditions, the Windows 10 that I'm running NextPVR on is basically stock. It's pretty much a clean installation, and there isn't much else installed on it other than NextPVR. I try to keep things light and dedicate a computer to doing almost nothing other than running NextPVR, so that other programs don't hog resources and cause problems just like this one to happen. Apparently, I still haven't done enough to prevent these kinds of problems. Damn.

[BrettB]

It seems to be a low memory issue,  you appear to recording every show on multiple channels too, not sure about your use case, but this is extreme use that would never be tested.  You will need to monitor the recording service, to see how much it is using and if it is growing suspiciously big.

Martin

If what you say is true, that means that the software has a serious memory leak somewhere.

My computer currently has 16 GB of RAM. You'd think that would be enough, but apparently not. I've been considering doubling it for a while, and this is probably what will put me over the edge.

He didn't say that the low virtual memory was caused by NextPVR. He simply pointed out that your event log messages indicated that parts of windows had shutdown due to low virtual memory.

I seriously doubt that a memory leak in NextPVR is your problem. (Unless you have upgraded to v6 and the Microsoft .net 6 has a bug.) It is not unusual for me to have 6 simultaneous recordings going (at least during pre- post-padding times and during prime time new season airings). And my production NextPVR server regularly runs for months at a time.

[mvallevand]

My point wasn't that what you are doing is right or wrong but no one of the testers is going to bother scheduling and recording 100+ recordings in one day so you need to monitor NextPVR memory use to see if it is a problem with NextPVR or not. It good also be garbage collection in netcore not releasing memory. Without a doubt this is exreme use for personal viewing. I will however remind you of sub's response here https://forums.nextpvr.com/showthread.ph...#pid507465

Martin