Random lockups

[Abev107]

Last week I u/g my Sage box from a Celeron x? with 512 RAM to a P4 3.0 with 1g RAM. The performance increase has been incredible.

I have found Sage software to be rock solid - until you make a small change (or large) and all bets are off.

Some blah blah is to follow - my ultimate question is where do I start with troubleshooting Sage?

I am getting random lockups. Not usually crashes - just lockups where Sage will freeze for a few minutes then become responsive again. If during this time I was recording live TV, the recording has a several minute gap in it, although sometimes it recorded all the way through the lockup.

Two things have brought Sage out of the lock up. Just wait, and sometimes Sage "restarts" - the comp doesn't restart and Sage doesn't restart. It's almost like the graphics card restarts. What I see is the tv screen going black for a couple seconds then pops back up like nothing happened. The other thing I have tried is to put Sage in Standby then come back to it several minutes (20?) later and it seems fine.

This random lockup occurred just earlier today. I was watching a show that began recording at 630. I started watching it at 638, and caught up to live tv around 650. Once I caught up to it - it froze. I put Sage in standby and came back to it after 7 (when the show ended) and it was fine. Could this have something to do with the transcoder?

The other issue I get is if I am watching either live tv or a recorded TV and Sage changes the channel, Sage pauses. I have to back up the program 10 secs then play and most of the time it's fine.

Any thoughts on where I can begin to diagnose these issues?

[Narflex]

First thing I'd check is what's the CPU usage like on your system when the problem is occuring. That'll tell you if something is actually hanging; or if things appear to be hung because something is swamping the CPU.

If something is hanging; then it's likely related to the graphics card or the video decoder. Different video renders/decoders can solve that usually.

If it's maxing the CPU; then you'll need to check first if it's SageTV doing that using the task manager. If you confirm that it's SageTV; then check what the memory usage is in System Information. If the JVM Heap Size is close to the max then the CPU may be getting pegged with java garbage collection. There's a registry setting to fix that called 'JVMMaxHeapSizeMB'. (longer term users of SageTV end up having larger databases w/ lots of content that can increase the base memory requirement)

Hope that helps.

[KJake]

This recently helped me out My Wiz.bin is around 20MB and I think some of my problems were actually stemming from SageMC (disk bar update thread maybe?) - so I'm back to the default STV with the Comskip STVi and I think this is the best that the system/setup has performed (I also upped the JVM Heap Size to 512MB).