Slow UI Response in Recordings

[martinatime]

First of all I want to thank Sub for this wonderful product. I was unsatisfied by the proprietary software that came with my capture card and I just couldn't get mythTV to work correctly and when I found this I was overjoyed.

My only issue is the slow response of the UI in Recordings which seems to degrade as I accumulate more recordings. I'm using v0.94.13 on AMD Sempron 2600 machine with 1GB of RAM. The capture card is a Hauppaugge PVR-350 with 45 button remote. My recordings are stored on a seperate partition from the operating system which is 290GB in size. When that partition is approximately 25% full it takes about 1-2 minutes to make a selection.

I did a little searching within this forum and the only performance suggestions I could find were related to block size on the storage drive. I am pretty sure that I formatted it with 4k block size before but I am reformatting that drive now to be absolutely sure.

Are there any other hints or tips that might boost performance of the UI Navigation?

Thanks ahead of time,
Martinatime

[stefan]

That does not sound right. Not that I have that large a HD, but my Recordings section is about 100 GB filled up pretty much all the time, and it takes nowhere near that long to make a selection. And my computer is a *lot* slower than yours. Not that this will help you in any way, but I think that you shouldn't be looking at performance boosting, you should try to figure out the root cause of your problem...

[atamas]

Hi, I also have the same issue. The longest time is encoutered when entering the "Recordings" screen which can take a good minute. Once in, browsing recordings up and down is ok. When I select a recording group however, it takes about 10 to 20 seconds to show the group contents (i.e. all the MotorWeek episodes).

It also takes about 3 or 4 minutes for GBPVR UI menu to start up.

I compacted the Access database which is at 13MB now and I am using two 150 tuners.

The recordings are on a 300GB internal slave hard drive which runs at 7200RPMs. It's formatted on NTFS. I usually keep a little more than 200GB recorded so I have a lot of content ready for the kids.

Any suggestion to improve performance is appreciated. I thought about clearing the EPG and all scheduled recordings and kinda start fresh but I don't know if that will help.

[martinatime]

That does not sound right. Not that I have that large a HD, but my Recordings section is about 100 GB filled up pretty much all the time, and it takes nowhere near that long to make a selection. And my computer is a *lot* slower than yours. Not that this will help you in any way, but I think that you shouldn't be looking at performance boosting, you should try to figure out the root cause of your problem...

How would you suggest that I go about doing a root cause analysis of this? I'm still fairly a newbie at this stuff but I have done tons of debugging in the past (just not in the microsoft world). Any suggestions would be helpful. Thanks

[stefan]

There are a bunch of logs in you installation directory. This would typically be c:\program files\devnz\gbpvr

The logs have timestamps. Check them and see if you can see any steps that "shouldn't" take too much time, but still deos. Maybe we can narrow it down to something.

[atamas]

I'm attaching the GBPVR.exe.log which shows a few erros when I start GBPVR.EXE. Could it be that GBPVR is waiting for something and then it times out?

Perhaps the wait is one of the plugins. I have a some plugins installed, Theater, Weather, Music, etc.

12/12/2005 12:30:37 PM.131 VERBOSE [2] installDirectory is C:\Program Files\devnz\gbpvr\
12/12/2005 12:30:37 PM.131 VERBOSE [2] configurationFile is config.xml
12/12/2005 12:30:37 PM.146 VERBOSE [2] getValue() loading new key/value into cache: /settings/DatabaseConnectionString
12/12/2005 12:30:37 PM.146 VERBOSE [2] getValue: /settings/DatabaseConnectionString : Provider=Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0;Data Source=".\gbpvr.mdb";User Id=admin;Password=
12/12/2005 12:30:37 PM.146 VERBOSE [2] databaseConnectionString is Provider=Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0;Data Source="C:\Program Files\devnz\gbpvr\\gbpvr.mdb";User Id=admin;Password=
12/12/2005 12:30:37 PM.146 VERBOSE [2] getValue() loading new key/value into cache: /settings/DontAntiAlias
12/12/2005 12:30:37 PM.146 VERBOSE [2] getValue: /settings/DontAntiAlias : false
12/12/2005 12:30:37 PM.146 VERBOSE [2] getValue() loading new key/value into cache: /settings/LoggingLevel
12/12/2005 12:30:37 PM.146 VERBOSE [2] getValue: /settings/LoggingLevel : Error
12/12/2005 12:30:38 PM.631 ERROR [2] Unable to find node: /settings/CompositeImages/CompositeImage[@name="ActorInfoBioBackground"]/DrawImage[@filename="@Poster"]
12/12/2005 12:30:38 PM.631 ERROR [2] Unable to find node: /settings/CompositeImages/CompositeImage[@name="ActorInfoGalleryBackground"]/DrawImage[@filename="@Poster"]
12/12/2005 12:30:38 PM.631 ERROR [2] Unable to find node: /settings/CompositeImages/CompositeImage[@name="ActorInfoMoviesBackground"]/DrawImage[@filename="@Poster"]
12/12/2005 12:31:57 PM.490 ERROR [2] Unable to find node: /settings/SpecialElements/SpecialElement[@name="MenuType"]
12/12/2005 12:31:57 PM.506 ERROR [2] Unable to find node: /settings/SpecialElements/SpecialElement[@name="MenuType"]
12/12/2005 12:31:57 PM.506 ERROR [2] Unable to find node: /settings/SpecialElements/SpecialElement[@name="MenuType"]
12/12/2005 12:31:57 PM.506 ERROR [2] Unable to find node: /settings/SpecialElements/SpecialElement[@name="MenuType"]
12/12/2005 12:31:57 PM.506 ERROR [2] Unable to find node: /settings/SpecialElements/SpecialElement[@name="MenuType"]
12/12/2005 12:31:57 PM.521 ERROR [2] Unable to find node: /settings/SpecialElements/SpecialElement[@name="MenuType"]
12/12/2005 12:31:57 PM.521 ERROR [2] Unable to find node: /settings/SpecialElements/SpecialElement[@name="MenuType"]

[sub]

You've got the logging level set to 'Error' so its not going to show anything useful.

[martinatime]

There are a bunch of logs in you installation directory. This would typically be c:\program files\devnz\gbpvr

The logs have timestamps. Check them and see if you can see any steps that "shouldn't" take too much time, but still deos. Maybe we can narrow it down to something.

You've got the logging level set to 'Error' so its not going to show anything useful.

I've looked at the log files and I don't see anything that stands out as an error or any odd behavior. Currently, my 288GB RAID is 70% full and it takes between 20-30 seconds between menu clicks (ex: from main into recordings or from recordings into what's new, etc). So far it seems that the only way to speed the menus up is to delete my older recordings but that is a time consuming process as well due to the fact that it refreshes whatever listing that recording was part of (20-30 seconds for each delete). Any suggestions?

I'll probably be able to run some more "controlled" tests next weekend and be able to provide exact timings between operations.

Thanks for any help

[sub]

Martinatime, what version are you running? ie, have you upgraded to the new v0.96.8 release? The recording screen is much quicker in this release.

[martinatime]

Martinatime, what version are you running? ie, have you upgraded to the new v0.96.8 release? The recording screen is much quicker in this release.

I'm running with v0.94.13. do you recommend that I upgrade? if so, should I uninstall and start from scratch?

BTW, thanks for all of your hard work and time on this wonderful piece of software.