Fixes for slow UI and playback timeline issues

[dstay]

Hello,

I had been having lots of problems with Sage. I read a lot of other posts and many helped me, so I thought I'd try to help others by sharing some fixes:

I have a Sage 5.04 server running on XP Home on a 6 year old Dell P3-1Ghz, 512MB memory, 2-200GB drives, Gigabit LAN, Hauppauge 500 encoder card, 2 MVPs hardwired and two clients. I was having problems where playback would freeze randomly, fast-forward to strange spots, play for a few minutes and then show you as being at the end of an hour long recording, etc. I was also getting general slowness on the UI, taking several seconds to execute commands. Here's all of what I did to make the system happier, hope this helps you:

1. Disabled any screensaver running on the server
2. Rolled back Java to the original 1.4 that ships with Sage
3. TURNED OFF Java auto update
4. Updated to the latest Hauppauge Driver for the 500MCE (Base driver version 20.43_24108)
the driver is listed as beta on the link below:
http://www.hauppauge.com/pages/suppo...vr150.html#drv
5. Did the registry change for the Hauppauge encoders described here:
Post number twelve in this http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/show...ine+corruption thread.
6. Run an automatic disk defragger: I currently use Diskkeeper
7. For the MVP speeds, I used the following registry hack described by others on this board:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters]
"TcpWindowSize"=dword:000f4240
"Tcp1323Opts"=dword:00000001
8. Turned off all menu transition stuff

Now I've just got to get the time to do a full system rebuild with a new processor and such...hummm
Hope this helps!
-ds

[FidgetyRat]

Do you get alot of fragmentation using 64k clusters? Shouldn't really be the case, especially for video.

[dstay]

Yes, I get a TON of fragmentation, they system gets REALLY stupid if I don't defrag. Also it helps if you don't do Comskip processing when your system is in use, seems to help with the fragments. I've set my Dirmon and comskip to only do stuff when I'm asleep or at work.

-ds

[blade]

I still find it odd that some people have problems with fragmentation. I use 64k clusters and the last I checked my recording drives were 96-99% fragemented and I never have problems because of it.

[gplasky]

3 years. It has been 3 years and I have never defragged my original video storage drives. They are formatted in 64k clusters. These are 2 x 160 GB SATA drives that I originally setup as RAID 0. (Of course I have another Media server on the network serving up 800 GB. Never defragmented either.)

Gerry

[mdnttoker]

I have 64k clusters and defrag about once a month...(or in other words, MS Defrag says "you should defrag your drive" approx. once a month).

I use showanalyzer and comskip. Seagate drive. Std. windows IDE drivers.

-Dan