Occasional lag on client

[appelm]

I've recently set up my sagetv system. I have three clients running throughout the house. On my home theatre system which is where I spend the most time watching, I've noticed an occasional lag while watching live or recorded shows. The lag will occur only once every 10 minutes or so. The screen just freezes for about 5-10 seconds, a very noticeable and annoying delay, and then restarts. Sometimes I'll see the Sage hourglass. Today, for the first and only time yet, while the screen was frozen suddenly Sage said the connection to the server had been lost. It soon regained the connection. This seems to point to a network problem but I can't think of what it could be or know how to fix it. I have Cat 6 newly wired throughout the house and gigabit nics, gigabit netgear switch and a lynksys 10/100 router. Any suggestions? The posts I've read seem more to do with stuttering than this sort of intermittent lag.

Thanks,
Marc

[appelm]

This problem is continuing for me.. Every 10 minutes or so the screen just freezes for a good 10 seconds and then playback resumes. Its a big issue in terms of WAF, as you can imagine. Any suggestions? I don't think this is a network problem because I don't notice any issues when playing ripped DVDs off my networked media server. I suppose I could report this to tech support.

[pjriley]

I was experiencing similar issue since I upgraded to Sage 4. Very vrustrating.

This past weekend.. I discovered that I was only running on 512MB main memory instead of the 1GB that I usually run (long story..., won't go into it here ).

After I added more memory, bringing the total to 1GB, the problem went completely away.

It is clear to me that anything less than 1GB memory with Windows XP-SP2 is inadequate on my HTPC. I am even running a minimalist SW config to keep overhead low (no virus scanner, etc.)

In general, my Sage4 system seems to be much more stable (fewer lockups and crashes) now that I have added memory. I need to give it a few more days before final judgement. If this continues to run solid... Ithink I will add another GB of memory

[appelm]

Interesting.. well I already have 1 GB of memory on the client. I could try installing more and see if that helps. What about on the server? How much memory is recommended there? I actually only have 512mb on the server.

[appelm]

Well I think I fixed the problem. I had installed sage as a server on an extra computer I had that was a couple of years old, a P4 2.4ghz. I just emptied some space on it and stuck in a new 250 gig drive for storage. Well the windows xp pro on that machine must have been pretty bogged down with years of use because I finally noticed that just using the machine itself was a bit tedious and slow. I wasn't using it for anything other than the sage server but in attempting to debug this found the os seemed slow. So I decided to just reformat the OS. I backed up my sage directory and then reinstalled everything.


The result: no more intermittent lag on my clients.

Just thought I'd share my (rather drastic) solution. Clearly, a clean machine is best for the server.