Runaway Memory Leak in SageTV Service

[MrApollinax]

Originally Posted by krunkyou

I'm having the exact same problem. I'm running the sage software with WinDVD creator. I'm using a Plextor ConvertX TV402U capture device. My System is a Dell Pentium 4 3.8 with Hyperthreading, 512 Memory. The operating system is Windows Media Center. I'm recording in DivX, highest quality.

Here is what I noticed. The system is fine until I record something. After the recording is done, the system attempts to convert the mpg or mpgs (they are in parts sometimes) into an AVI file. Sage creates a TMP file for the conversion. As this temp drive grows, the Page File (not the system memory) grows and grows and grows until it maxes out the system. The system memory stays the same, about 50-80k) Doesn't matter how big I configure the page file, the conversion process will run away with whatever is there. The PC becomes slow and I get messages that I'm running out of virtual memory. Usually, at some point the conversion stalls before it has a chance to complete, but the system never gives back the Virtual memory it took until I stop the Sage service. When I restart the service, it will try to convert the file again, and my virtual memory fills up again. The only way to stop the cycle is to delete the recording. If there are no files to convert, no problems.

I can't be the only person who has this problem. I'm probably going to shoot a note to Support today to see what they have to say, but if anybody here can shed some light on this, it would be appreciated. Thanks.

I don't think your problem is the same as this one seeing it was a system update problem for the OP. Your problem seems to be more of a system issue.

One thing you need to get straight first is that SageTV isn't trying to put the avi wrapper on your file, the plextor device is trying to do that. Sage only gives you the DivX options because it is supported by your capture device. I used to see the system performance hit you are seeing until I switched over to recording in MEPG2. No need to wrap the file thus no need to eat up unecessary resoruces.

Another thing is that I had read somewhere that this particular capture card doesn't deal well with hyperthreading. Have you tried turning that off and running the service? Any improvement?

[emok]

I'm wondering if this could possibly be an issue with multi-processor systems. After upgrading to a dual-core A64 system with 1GB RAM, I started seeing extremely high memory usage as well (Task Manager shows 900MB used). I also saw references to hyperthreading in previous messages, which may be a common factor among people having problems.

I was previously running a single core A64 and did not see this problem. The hardware upgrade was followed by a completely fresh install of XP sp2 and all associated apps, though I did bring my wiz.bin and sage.properties from my previous install.

So, the main changes that happened
1. new dual core processor (A64 X2 3800+)/MB (MSI K8NGM2-FID)/AMD processor drivers
2. latest windows updates
3. removed one PVR-150

Oh, I'm running SageTV 4.1.3 with latest JRE 1.5, I switched back to 1.4 to see if it would make a difference. I'll check it again tonight.

What kind of systems are the people who are having problems running? Are they multi-processor (logically)?

[Opus4]

I doubt it has anything to do with a dual core processor -- I've always run SageTV on a dual cpu system & now a dual core system.

SageTV is the process using that much memory? You could try the latest beta & submit your logs if it still continues. If you have a corrupted wiz.bin file, save & submit that file as well.

- Andy

[emok]

Sage isn't consuming ALL of the memory, but a large chunk of it. I AM running with some imports. I'll try to troubleshoot (disable some imports, disable comskip) it more tonight and see if there's any impact.

Thanks

BTW, where do I find the sage logs?

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by emok

BTW, where do I find the sage logs?

Among other places, here's the FAQ entry.

- Andy