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[Aaron Whitehouse <question106466@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

New question #106466 on Mythbuntu:
https://answers.launchpad.net/mythbuntu/+question/106466

Hello all,

I've spent a long time trying to narrow this down, but I'm really struggling and could do with any help/suggestions that you can come up with.

I use an AMD 780G board with a 1TB Western Digital EAS HDD and a 2.4GHz (or thereabouts) Sempron CPU. I have 2 GB RAM and have just added an nVidia 8600GT 512MB. I was previously using analogue TV over a pvr150 tuner and a bttv tuner. I have just replaced the pvr150 with a Hauppauge hvr-2200.

I have run Mythbuntu for quite a long time. We used 9.10 without too much trouble. After some updates near the beginning of this year, Mythbuntu started stalling for 1-3 minutes at a time, with the hard disk light on solidly and nothing else working. The system would be virtually unresponsive, but would slowly crawl to a terminal etc. Then, after about 1-3 mins, it would be back to normal. I can't see anything that could be causing the problem in top, iotop or the system logs. There are some entries in the logs about different kernel tasks being killed because they didn't start properly in 120 seconds, but I think that is a symptom rather than a cause.

I have now changed the card to an nVidia and am using the proprietary drivers. I've removed one of the tuner cards. I upgraded the system to Lucid Beta and downloaded all the latest updates. The problem is still occurring, even when all I was doing was browsing folders in Thunar, so that suggests to me that it isn't MythTV causing this (mythbackend is still running, but I haven't loaded in the database or set anything up). To give an idea of the problem, running a 42 minute video in VLC took 53 mins with the stalls.  The memory looks okay (I have 2GB in it), with free -m showing most "used", but "cached".

I haven't yet sorted out all of the VDPAU etc., but I'm guessing that those are unlikely to solve the problem when it stalls the system so much that even a terminal can't work.  Given that it isn't showing in top/iotop, I'm wondering if it is something really low-level. On the other hand, I would have thought it would need to be hardware-specific or everyone would be complaining.

If anyone can help me, it would make a huge difference -- even if only to suggest more diagnostics or logs to review.

Thanks in advance,

Aaron

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