HD Extender UI Sluggish-Comskip

[skyeclad]

Hey guys, I've had the HD Extender running for a few days now and I've been experiencing periodic UI sluggishness where practically every remote key press produces a delay and spinning circle before executing the action.

Whenever this happens I've been going to the server and looking at what resources are in use and what the CPU hit is. One thing stands out to me that is having a definite effect on the Extender performance, running comskip. I've always noticed a slight delay in the Server UI whenever comskip is running but nothing to bother me too much over so I've allowed Comskip monitor to run comskip whenever it needs to.

So noticing that comskip was using 90+ CPU resources, I killed the service and voila, the Extender's UI returns to being snappy again. Now, although the UI had been sluggish it didn't effect video playback.

So my temporary solution is to schedule comskip for late at night and when I'm at work only. I also have set comskip monitor to slow for times when I might be using the Extender. Has anyone else noticed this? Can Sage or the Extender(SagetvService?) be set to take priority over some other processes so that it doesn't experience a hit in performance?

[skyeclad]

Has anyone else experienced the sluggish UI with lots of pause "circles" before actually moving the menu highlight? Sometimes it takes me forever just to scroll to the show that I want but once I hit play, the show plays fine.

[gplasky]

No. As a matter of fact hte HD Extender is as fast, or maybe a itte oerkier than the PC clients. Sounds like you need a more powerful server if you're going to continue running comskip on it. Either schedule it off hours like you have done or have another PC run comskip for you.

Gerry

[skyeclad]

I can have another pc run comskip? So I guess I would just need to map the location on the network and have another PC running comskip and comskip monitor? That might work.

I discovered another little quirk. When the Sage Server is running the picture slide show as a screen saver, it uses nearly 80% CPU to display the pictures. As a result the Extender UI suffers again! I've been wondering why the Extender has been sluggish even with comskip off and now I think it's the SageTV program itself, which has gone into sleep mode and displaying the image slide show which is causing the issues with the Extender.