"Therapeutic Reboot" of Sage Service vs. Sage Program

[Savage1701]

Right now I am doing an every-other-day cold boot of my Sage Server and HD-PVR. As long as I do this, apparently the memory leak stays low enough not to crash the HD-PVR, or whatever is going on.

Merely exiting and re-launching Sage Server as a program is not good enough, for whatever reason.

For those of you doing "therapeutic reboots", are you getting good results if running Sage as a Service, stopping the service, and restarting it? Or do you still have to do cold boots/warm restarts of the entire system?

I'm going off the assumption that either a memory leak exists or there is a loss of communication or something between the HD-PVR and Sage. I would almost never need a reboot if I was just using ATSC OTA tuners.

Since my Sage stuff is on an Ethernet PDU, I also cold-shutdown my HD-PVR as well when I do a cold reboot.

Any info is appreciated.

For my system, this is the only way to keep it crash free.

[gambitpvr]

It sounds like you are running into the HD-PVR overheat issue. The HD-PVRs tend to overheat because of poor cooling. You may want to try addressing that to see if it helps with stability. Taking the cover off of the HD-PVR usually helps but it really needs some kind of fan cooling. Something as simple as putting a small desktop fan to blow over the main board will do the trick but you can install a fan on the HD-PVR. I have a link to a simple fan mod in my signature.

As for reboots, I have some experience there as well. My HD-PVR was rock solid until I installed my Colossus card. So, now I have to do daily restarts of Sage to work around the Colossus issue.

I have Sage set to run as a service and use the Windows Task Scheduler to run a simple 'net stop sagetv'/ 'net start sagetv' bat file to restart Sage every morning. I've been running it for about a month and haven't see any issues.

[QueOnda]

Or XP. I had issues with memory leak with xp, then when I went to win7 (same computer). I can go weeks without issues.

[MattHelm]

Hmmmmmmmm. I use the HDPVR, and while I do reset about once a week, it's mainly because I play with the system WAY to much. I don't think I've reset my HDPVR since I moved (mid-Feb), though I have had it locked up at least once in 2 years. Most of the problems I've had with recording with it, have been the cable company resetting the box.

[cat6man]

i don't have anything to add but i have to say i love the phrase 'therapeutic reboot'

[Savage1701]

Originally Posted by gambitpvr

It sounds like you are running into the HD-PVR overheat issue. The HD-PVRs tend to overheat because of poor cooling. You may want to try addressing that to see if it helps with stability. Taking the cover off of the HD-PVR usually helps but it really needs some kind of fan cooling. Something as simple as putting a small desktop fan to blow over the main board will do the trick but you can install a fan on the HD-PVR. I have a link to a simple fan mod in my signature.

As for reboots, I have some experience there as well. My HD-PVR was rock solid until I installed my Colossus card. So, now I have to do daily restarts of Sage to work around the Colossus issue.

I have Sage set to run as a service and use the Windows Task Scheduler to run a simple 'net stop sagetv'/ 'net start sagetv' bat file to restart Sage every morning. I've been running it for about a month and haven't see any issues.

I've had it fan cooled since I got it. It is one of the new revisions. Thank you for the suggestions on the batch file for starting and stopping it as a service as well. Sure would beat a cold boot.

[Savage1701]

Originally Posted by MattHelm

Hmmmmmmmm. I use the HDPVR, and while I do reset about once a week, it's mainly because I play with the system WAY to much. I don't think I've reset my HDPVR since I moved (mid-Feb), though I have had it locked up at least once in 2 years. Most of the problems I've had with recording with it, have been the cable company resetting the box.

Well, I'm sort of dealing with that as well, since Dish puts that stupid splash screen on and does its download thing whether I want it to or not.

[Savage1701]

Originally Posted by cat6man

i don't have anything to add but i have to say i love the phrase 'therapeutic reboot'

I can't take credit for that but someone else on the forum coined the phrase and I love it also.

[Savage1701]

Originally Posted by QueOnda

Or XP. I had issues with memory leak with xp, then when I went to win7 (same computer). I can go weeks without issues.

I've thought of that as well, but it seems many people with Win 7 also have HD-PVR issues.

You are no doubt right it is a memory leak; I was just hoping to take care of things without a full cold boot if running it as a service and starting and stopping it every day or so would do the trick.

[jorton]

I have been doing the "I have Sage set to run as a service and use the Windows Task Scheduler to run a simple 'net stop sagetv'/ 'net start sagetv' bat file to restart Sage every morning" technique for about a year and also have my 4 HDPVR's on $20 power bar that has a built in timer that is set to cycle power to them when the Sagetv service is down (15 minute window). I have been thinking of trying my system without all this since but it has been working well and I don't want to jinx myself... I may have just done that by saying it's working well... doh!

Jeremy

[texneus]

I have always performed a nightly reboot of my HTPC from the very start (back when I used XP MCE 2005). Windows will be Windows. I have found nightly reboots improve overall system responsiveness and prevent the system from becoming generally quirky/ornery which vastly improves the whole HTPC "appliance like" experience. Since they are scheduled at 4:00am the process is completely invisible, non-invasive, and trivial to do.

Across several machines, IME maximum up time for XP is 5ish days (less for SP1 and earlier), Vista was a couple days, and Win7 is something between 1-2 weeks. The most stable Windows OS ever was Win 2k, which I found could easily stay up for a month or more, the worst was 3.x where uptime was a few hours.

Some may disagree with my philosophy, but that is IME.

[Tiki]

I have been using my HD-PVR since last September (~9 months). In that time, I have only cycled power to it once (I keep it plugged in to a UPS).

I restart the Sage service about once every 4-6 weeks - usually when installing some software or doing some other experiment.

I reboot my PC about once every 6-8 weeks - again, just when required to install some software or hardware.

I run Sage as a service and my primary viewing is done on a TV connected directly to the Sage machine. I re-start the Sage UI maybe every 2-4 weeks.

I have noticed that immediately after re-starting the UI, Sage will feel "snappier" for the first few hours of use. This is particularly noticeable when first hitting "play" to watch a recording and when seeking within a recording. When I first re-start the UI, these things happen almost instantly, but after a few hours I start to get more spinning circles. When I hit skip forward, it may pause, give a spinning circle for 3-7 seconds, then skip forward and resume. Or when I first hit play, I may see that the video and audio are out of sync - I get video with no sound for 2-3 seconds, then the video freezes and I get sounds for 2-3 seconds, then after another second or two, everything syncs up and plays fine. If I skip back and re-play, it plays that section fine. These symptoms have been about the same with both Sage 6 and Sage 7.

Incidentally, I have my Java heap set at 768MB, but whenever I check it, it rarely exceeds half the limit. Since moving to Sage 7 about 2 months ago, I am not using any plugins.

[stevech]

Originally Posted by QueOnda

Or XP. I had issues with memory leak with xp, then when I went to win7 (same computer). I can go weeks without issues.

I've run Sage 6 on XP SP2 for years, with no plug-ins. No leaks needing reboots. In the midst of change to Sage 7 for HD.

[Savage1701]

I appreciate all the comments; I think I am going to try to run Sage as a service and look into the .bat file to do restarts when not being used.

I noticed one of the posters is using a power strip with timer. I have an ethernet PDU so I suppose I could schedule the HD-PVR to be off during that window as well.

Is it necessary to do a cold re-start of the HD-PVR as well? Or good enough to stop the Sage running as a service?

Daily re-boots have resulted in ZERO issues with my HD-PVR for the last few weeks, so I think it is more than a chance that something is leaking memory that is not being recovered correctly. Since I have no ability to track things like that, it's far easier for me to do the "therapeutic reboot" than to joust with digital windmills, especially when I get up for work around 5:30 anyway and it takes me all of 5 minutes to power-cycle Sage with its ethernet PDU...