Slow to respond after a period of inactivity

[jvfff]

I currently have a 6.3.10 installed on a dedicated media PC. It is configured to start slideshow after a few minutes of inactivity. It all starts fine, but after a while (not sure how long), the screen is black and the only remote button it seems to respond to is 'power', which is actually configured to close the app. After reopening SageTV it behaves normally as though nothing happened. I use SageMC, but it seems that it doesn't matter, I switched back to the standard UI for a few days just to verify this problem and it still happens... Tried playing with various settings to no success. What could it be?
Thanks!

[davephan]

Are doing anything with "power saving" on the computer, such as saving power when the hard drives are "not being used"?

Have you tried changing the 'Screen Saver Timeout" parameter?

Dave

[jvfff]

Thanks for your reply. I double checked to make sure, but everything power saving related in the OS is disabled - screensaver, monitor and hard drive shut off. Any other ideas? I'm running on XP and it used to work fine, but since I switched to a different PC I now have this problem, however I'm not sure whether it started immediately after the switch or a bit later since I did not pay particular attention to this in the beginning. Now, as I mentioned, Sage becomes very slow to respond, as if it itself goes into sleep. It does come back to life sometimes after some hesitation, and if it does, it usually has broken UI, so the best option is to shut it down and rerun.

[davephan]

Do you have any power saving setup in the BIOS?

Dave

[pseudonym]

It sounds like your PC could be going into 'standby' (sometimes called 'sleep'). This is configured on a different tab or different place in control panel from the other power settings, depending on the OS. Look for whether the PC is allowed to go into standby mode and disable it. The PC might also be trying to hibernate, so check that too. An incomplete hibernation (due to one of the bugs documented by microsoft) can behave the way you describe.

Also, completely separate from power settings in control panel, is a setting whether the OS is allowed to power down a device (usually USB but there are others). This is on each invidual device's properties in the Device Manager, so you'll need to look at each one. For devices where power management applies, there will be another tab in the properties labeled "power management".

For a visual example of what I'm talking about, open up the properties on a "USB Root Hub" device manager listing, there should be a 'power management' tab, with a check-box as to whether the PC is allowed to shut off power to the device. Usually this is allowed by default. You may wish to visit all the devices and change any settings as appropriate for any reason, not just for SageTV...

And if you've checked all of this, please ignore my post :-)

--pseudonym

[jvfff]

Thank you for the replies, guys. In my case I think there is something wrong with Sage, because other applications actually don't have any problem and I can switch between them with no delay. At this time Sage remains black for a long while until finally coming back to life (sometimes though it doesn't come back at all, although probably it just needs more time for whatever it is doing internally). It looks like Sage is the only one sleeping. Is there a setting that I may be missing in Sage? Even though it is configured to start slideshow on timeout, maybe there is another setting to send it to sleep if timeout is even longer?

[davephan]

Did you already check Power Management within SageTV?

Setup, Detailed Setup, Customize, Power Management Settings, Configure

Here are my parameters:

Status check frequency: 30 seconds
Wakeup time: 2.0 minutes

The other configuration is: Setup, Detailed Setup, General


Here are my parameters:

Screen Saver on Sleep: Enabled
Screen Saver Timeout: 20 minutes
Screen Saver Type: Slideshow

Dave

[jvfff]

Dave, thank you for sharing your settings. I had almost the same except I had Screen Saver on Sleep set to disable, maybe that was it (I hope). Although I think I remember changing it to disable in an attempt to fix the same problem. I set it now to enable, we'll see what happens.

[pseudonym]

Originally Posted by jvfff

Thank you for the replies, guys. In my case I think there is something wrong with Sage, because other applications actually don't have any problem and I can switch between them with no delay. At this time Sage remains black for a long while until finally coming back to life (sometimes though it doesn't come back at all, although probably it just needs more time for whatever it is doing internally). It looks like Sage is the only one sleeping. Is there a setting that I may be missing in Sage? Even though it is configured to start slideshow on timeout, maybe there is another setting to send it to sleep if timeout is even longer?

Just wondering, some people (me included) have had problems with version 6.3.10 and the SageTV MPEG Audio decoder (it's the one used by default). Problems range from CPU spikes to hangs that SageTV doesn't recover from. Check your setup and change to AC3Filter, Cyberlink or other choice for audio decoder. It's a longshot but worth a try?

--pseudonym

[jvfff]

After changing that one setting the problem is still happening. Sometimes Sage is still showing the slideshow after timeout (therefore not sleeping), but is very slow to respond to any input --> if I press a few buttons, the effect is seen, if ever, only after a couple of minutes and the UI shows broken colors. Any other ideas?

[mckinsey]

it's been mentioned before but you never indicated if you had checked the device power down options outside sagetv. look for system problems before you start blaming sagetv. i assume you've looked for high cpu usage with task manager and didn't see anything. slow performance could be from sage trying to convert video.

a problem like this could also originate from a bad driver, video, network, etc. you might consider a reinstall and then installing hardware one device at a time.

good luck.

[jvfff]

System level issues tend to affect the system in a global way. This problem seems to be local to Sage, since other applications behave normally at the same time. I did check CPU load at the time and it's almost idle. I don't even have tuners setup yet and use Sage as a video/music/picture player and I've never used Sage to convert any videos. It does seem to have to do with the idle timeout, because when we 'actively' use Sage to watch video or listen to music everything is fine. I guess, I'll try the tech support.