SageTV slow response

[jphhughes]

Mike thanks for the additonal input. Your description of Sage behavior is exactly what happening to me.

[jphhughes]

Ok this is what I did. I got to thinking about replacing the properties file with my old one and decided I did not want to do this first because I like the way Sage was setup currently as a result of it basically setting its self up after I deleted the properties files and the Wiz files. So instead I decided to eliminate some obvious processes that were running as suggested by Mike. I used the MSCONFIG from command line to do this. After rebooting without these processes running the systems seemed about the same with no real improvement. The one process or program I did not stop was Norton’s anitvirus. Guess what, as soon as I turned off Norton’s auto protect the system became very responsive and Sage was a spiffy as you could want.

This presents a dilemma; I can’t leave my system unprotected from virus invasion. Anybody have any suggestions on how I can continue to run Norton’s or is that not going to be possible.

Again I would like to thank Stranger89 for his continued help though out this long process and Mike for his suggestions as well.

PS this is based on two hours of operation turning Norton's on and off twice.

[stanger89]

Hey, glad to hear you have it working. I was really at a loss to what could be up with Sage to cause it to respond slowly.

You could try and leave Norton running but raise Sage's priority and/or lower Norton's.

[TunaBoo]

Norton in general sucks, try McAfee.

[Opus4]

tip-toeing in...

Originally posted by jphhughes
as soon as I turned off Norton’s auto protect the system became very responsive and Sage was a spiffy as you could want.

What version of NAV? I've got NAV 2004 & perhaps you are already doing so, but I would suggest attempting to change some of the Auto-Protect options. For comparison, since I don't have a SageTV conflict with NAV at the moment... I have Auto-Protect on & loaded at startup; auto repair the files; comprehensive file scanning; & scan within compressed files. BloodHound is enabled at the default level. (Is yours at high?). All Advanced options are on. My exclusions are: *.dbx, *.nch, & "\system volume information". The client also has *.js excluded, but I believe that has to do with some other program that uses scripts & it would bog down w/constant scanning. (Script Blocking is still enabled, though.) Hmmm... sounds lke I have most options turned on, so I'm not sure what you might be able to turn off compared to mine.

I also ended up renaming \Program Files\Symantec\LiveUpdate so that LiveUpdate could not automatically run. Even after disabling the scheduled task that was used to check for updates periodically & turning off the auto-LiveUpdate feature, it would still do some sort of check & slow my internet access to a crawl once it did its thing after rebooting.

Don't know if any of this will help, but there's some input from another NAV user...

- Andy

[jphhughes]

Andy, thanks for the additional details. I will need to look into Norton's further and see if any ccombination of configuration works better then another with Sage. Basically it came installed on the machine I have and is configured for Auto-protect. However when I turn off auto-protect Sage responds fine. With it One Sage grinds to a snnails pace, and you can see the available memory in task manager go way down. WIth auto-protect off memory goes way back up and everything works fine.

I still find this hard to believe as I am sure most Sage User have Norton's running and are not having this problem.

I also have Norton's internet security running but I have not even looked at that as a further complication.

[GbrNole]

i jumped the norton ship a LONG time ago. primarily use avg now and i'm very happy with it.

the tools in spybot (web filters) seem to provide me the most benefit these days though.

[mlbdude]

I have Sage installed on my HTPC which is a pretty closed system so I don't load any AV software on it. I have run McAfee on my client PC and it does not seem to affect it but I think it would affect Server different.

Is disabling necessary? Can you just configure it to ignore the Sage directories and processes?

[jominor]

Originally posted by jphhughes

I still find this hard to believe as I am sure most Sage User have Norton's running and are not having this problem.

I also have Norton's internet security running but I have not even looked at that as a further complication.

I am running Norton IS with at full o without problems. The machine is an Asus SIS chipset, P4 2.4, 1 gig of memory, 8500 AIW, using onboard soundMax and NIC, Sage beta .15, two PVR 250 v16s, connected to my television.

[jphhughes]

I used the exclude feature of Norton to exclude the frey Technologies directory and turned on Auto Protect and everything is working fine. thanks again for all the help.

Now I am truly enjoying SageTV.

[Opus4]

All Norton AntiVirus users, take note:

I'm replying here to bring this back into view in case it will help anyone else... I don't remember whether I saw the solution in this thread when it was new, but if I did, it may not have meant anything to me since excluding just the "Frey Technologies" directory & its subdirectories doesn't seem to help unless your video directory is still located there. From another recent thread (RAM gets all used up), it seems that you have to exclude the video directories where your recordings are stored, since NAV seems to interfere with playing them back, at least through SageTV.

The kicker for me is that I think I've had this problem all along, but never paid much attention to it, since my delays were only a few seconds, instead of the 10 seconds or more that others have been reporting & complaining about. Since I made this change last night, there is no delay whatsoever between a remote button press & SageTV's response. And, RAM usage doesn't continually decline as playback continues... I always just thought that was normal!

- Andy

[kny3twalker]

Why do I get lucky here and have no issues with Norton AV?
and by the way Norton Internet Security is resource hog

[Opus4]

Originally posted by kny3twalker
Why do I get lucky here and have no issues with Norton AV?

Did you leave it in its box, sitting on the shelf?

What version is it? I wonder if you have it configured in such a way that doesn't cause any problem. Does your free physical RAM count down during playback?

- Andy

[bgorrell]

I did some experimenting and found that it is best to exclude *.mpg from Norton Auto-Protect. Playing back any MPG file in any application causes the same memory usage problems as under SageTV. After making this change, all video playback is more responsive (SageTV, zPlayer, Windows Media Player, etc.).

This made me think about whether other file types are causing AV to slow down my system as well. I tested AVI files and found the same problem. It will slowly use up memory and then release it when the file is closed (I didn't wait past 50MB, but someone else said it released every 100MB of usage). I excluded AVI and it no longer wastes memory and is more responsive in startup, seeking, and smoothness.

Since the memory is released when the file is closed, I think any large continuous-use files will affect the system the most. Smaller files probably use memory similarly, but are likely to be closed quickly and the memory released. Based on this, I am exluding all Video, Audio, and even Picture formats from AutoProtect. This seems like a great tweak for overall system speed.

What I excluded: *.mpg, *.avi, *.wmv, *.mp3, *.raw, *.jpg, *.tif

All of these files are still scanned once a week in my scheduled system scan, so I am still fully protected. I am going to keep a close eye on the task manager to see what other apps might be affected and see if other exclusions are called for. Perhaps temp files with different extensions need to be excluded as well. For instance, if a video application wrote to TVRecording.tmp untill it was done and then renamed it to TVRecording.mpg, I would want to exclude .tmp files. Fortunately, Sage doesn't do this (it writes directly to .mpg), but if anyone else can think of similar file extensions that need exclusion, let us know.

I would also suggest a moderator try to get this added to the tips & tricks on Frey's support page since this seems to make an immediate difference for a lot of people. I am certainly very happy with the improvement.

- Brian

[kny3twalker]

Did you leave it in its box, sitting on the shelf?

What version is it? I wonder if you have it configured in such a way that doesn't cause any problem. Does your free physical RAM count down during playback?

no I am using it (and it was a downloaded version)
it is just version 2003

and no my physical RAM does not count down
I see it go up and down a few 100 KB thats all

configuraed in a certain way
-nope

[mls]

Still sounds to me like just not using Norton (or McAfee) and changing to something much less overblown (and less of a system hog) like Grisoft's free version of AVG would be a much easier solution.

Unless your keeping business records and/or web surfing some really bad web sites... I just don't see a need for using anti-virus software that hogs so much of the system on a machine that is a primarily dedicated to PVR usage.

I gave up on Norton and McAfee a long time ago when I found out they both caused far too many other instability problems (even for normal computer usage before I got into the PVR stuff).

But, to each there own...

[rhsmcc]

I had this same problem after installing the newest drivers from Hauppauge. After installing them sage would hang up every day. I wouldn’t call it a sage crash or lock up, but the cpu was pegged at 100% and sage wouldn’t respond to commands. It would take 4-5 minutes for each remote command to respond. Even after installing the new drivers I noticed slower remote or keyboard response in sage. Sage would continue to record shows correctly. Something sure didn’t work right for me and these drivers. I’m using a 350 and a gateway OEM 250 (15) with a heat sink on it. I had to go back to the previous drivers.