Crash goes the extender(s)

[tvmaster2]

Originally Posted by Opus4

As I've posted in the Schedules Direct EPG topic, the real issue here are the extremely large show images that the EPG grabber is getting, instead of the smaller ones that SD could provide. I'm asking there if anyone is interested in looking at the SD EPG grabber code.

Alternatively: My SageTV PC is getting older and slows down while displaying show images anyway. Not sure if anyone else has this problem, but I find that if I play video on the schedule or recordings menus instead of displaying the show images, response is greatly improved.

I'm starting to feel like I have no interest in seeing show images and am debating adding the ability to turn such images off in the UI. Am I the only one interested in this kind of solution to the very large images, potential crash issues, and UI slowdowns?

Maybe if I changed to a more modern PC and OS, I wouldn't have this issue, but... I can't find a shrug emoji. Oh well.

Andy

No, you’re not alone. Nice seeing a post from you again too
If I were a coder, I’d help, but sadly I am not. Maybe we should all just pay Josh a yearly fee...

[Opus4]

I'm still here & use SageTV; I just don't post much.

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by nyplayer

I stopped displaying images a while ago. I have no images in the guide and also no thumbnails.
I setup a thumbnail symlink... and Sage no longer uses thumbnails.or channels Icons.[/IMG]

I believe I'll actually start work on this: there will be new options to disable the display of thumbnails/art for shows and for whether to display channel logos. I'll probably leave all those items on the Detailed Info screens, since I believe that is where the info is most useful and it isn't where lots of shows are displayed while scrolling through various lists.

[KeithAbbott]

Originally Posted by Opus4

I believe I'll actually start work on this: there will be new options to disable the display of thumbnails/art for shows and for whether to display channel logos. I'll probably leave all those items on the Detailed Info screens, since I believe that is where the info is most useful and it isn't where lots of shows are displayed while scrolling through various lists.

Wow, excellent, thanks in advance! Are you thinking that you will be putting logic in there to select some of the smaller thumbnails/artwork, or are you going to stick with just enabling/disabling?

[Opus4]

Getting the smaller art is part of the SD EPG grabber discussion & should hopefully be done even if these new settings are not used by anyone. I just don't know who might make those art size changes.

Edit: and. hah! I don't think I've opened Studio since the last changes I made in August 2017, so I'm almost surprised I can still find my way around it.

Edit 2: as I figured, the program guide already has an option to include the logos.

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by nyplayer

I stopped displaying images a while ago. I have no images in the guide and also no thumbnails.
I setup a thumbnail symlink... and Sage no longer uses thumbnails.or channels Icons.

BTW: There is an existing option to turn off logos in the guide. If you change that, the channel name will take up the entire space instead of using just the right half, as shown in your above pic.

[nyplayer]

Originally Posted by Opus4

BTW: There is an existing option to turn off logos in the guide. If you change that, the channel name will take up the entire space instead of using just the right half, as shown in your above pic.

Thanks found it.

[Opus4]

Here is a test STV with the options to not display the thumbs/art and logos on screen with lists of airings (program guide, recordings, schedule, and such).

I did not remove the art from the Detailed Info type menus because a delay loading there seems OK to me, since those menus are not loaded quickly one right after the other & it seems like art is desired there. Of course, this means it isn't a solution to crashing the extender w/o the updated jar because the super large images could still be shown on such menus.

If anyone tries it, please let me know if there are issues. I'll use it for a bit before adding it to github.

Edit: Forgot to say, the new options are towards the bottom of Detailed Setup -> Customize.

[wnjj]

Originally Posted by Opus4

Getting the smaller art is part of the SD EPG grabber discussion & should hopefully be done even if these new settings are not used by anyone. I just don't know who might make those art size changes.

Edit: and. hah! I don't think I've opened Studio since the last changes I made in August 2017, so I'm almost surprised I can still find my way around it.

Edit 2: as I figured, the program guide already has an option to include the logos.

I could even make the changes to the code if I knew functionally what needs to happen. Is it a matter of shifting from med/large to small/med?

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by wnjj

I could even make the changes to the code if I knew functionally what needs to happen. Is it a matter of shifting from med/large to small/med?

Not sure. As we talked about in the other topic, we might want to check actual image sizes. I'll go post there again so we can talk about it.

[Malfunction]

Originally Posted by Narflex

I fixed this now and uploaded the fix to GitHub.

There's also another change I did which will help reduce the size of the database a little bit (and have a minor effect on Intelligent Recording, which I think will bother nobody).

HOWEVER, if you REALLY want to reduce your database usage there's another thing you can do. Mine was getting way too large (I have the oldest database as you'd expect, it's over 18 years old...has data from December 2002 in it when I first wrote SageTV)...my RAM usage was generally about 1GB, and I've almost cut it in half now.

If you set this in Sage.properties:
wizard/retain_airings_from_completed_recordings=false
wizard/last_maintenance=0

and you have a really old DB, that'll clean out LOTS of things. But you'll then want to put that first one back to true after it loads it and does the daily maintenance (which it'll do right after startup...but it may take awhile to complete). What that'll do is remove all the Airings from the database that were for recordings you made at one point in time but it no longer has....normally, those are useful if you move files around so SageTV won't delete the metadata for those files if they aren't in the right place or other things went wrong. But after years, it'll just be storing tons of data it doesn't really need at all.

My 50% reduction was based on the new JAR with the Wasted cleanup change along with setting the above property once. My system has limited RAM and I didn't feel like building a new one, so this was an easy way to make it fast again w/out losing my 18 years of history.

I'm going to try this. My recording schedule doesn't update unless I restart Sage. I have a huge WIZ.BIN and I see "Clean the database!" in my log. My installation is very old like yours. Wiz.bin is 1.6 gigs! (1,649,604k

[graywolf]

Originally Posted by Malfunction

I'm going to try this. My recording schedule doesn't update unless I restart Sage. I have a huge WIZ.BIN and I see "Clean the database!" in my log. My installation is very old like yours. Wiz.bin is 1.6 gigs! (1,649,604k

Would be interested in hearing your experience with this if it reduced the Wiz.bin for you and the RAM usage.

[waynedunham]

Originally Posted by Malfunction

I'm going to try this. My recording schedule doesn't update unless I restart Sage. I have a huge WIZ.BIN and I see "Clean the database!" in my log. My installation is very old like yours. Wiz.bin is 1.6 gigs! (1,649,604k

I know there are people out there with pretty big WIZ.BIN files. I have two servers running with WIZ.BIN's that are over 15 years old (my join date was back in 2004 here). They go back to some of the early versions of SageTV naturaly with conversions as WIZ.BIN format changes, etc. But I've never deleted them and started fresh at any time since at least 2004.

Anyway, my main machine's WIZ.BIN (newest hardware that's still over 10 year old) is about 145k and my backup machine (old original server installation) is about 130k.

I have over 4TB capacity on each machine with about 2TB of current or saved/archived recordings..

I have 8 tuners on my main machine and 6 on my old server. Probably 3-4 getting used regularly on both machines during prime time

I've had no issues with EPG updates using Schedules Direct.

[VCRUser]

Originally Posted by Narflex

I fixed this now and uploaded the fix to GitHub.

There's also another change I did which will help reduce the size of the database a little bit (and have a minor effect on Intelligent Recording, which I think will bother nobody).

HOWEVER, if you REALLY want to reduce your database usage there's another thing you can do. Mine was getting way too large (I have the oldest database as you'd expect, it's over 18 years old...has data from December 2002 in it when I first wrote SageTV)...my RAM usage was generally about 1GB, and I've almost cut it in half now.

If you set this in Sage.properties:
wizard/retain_airings_from_completed_recordings=false
wizard/last_maintenance=0

What, exactly, is cleared out here? The description references old airings, but what does it do with old recordings that I may or may not have watched and may or may not have deleted? Just want to make sure I don't break anything useful by changing this setting.

I've been having ongoing issues with older recordings having their metadata associated with shows occurring in the future, or with "no data," past or future. Is it possible that doing this cleanup would prevent future occurrences? My Wiz.bin is about 75mb (started in 2009).

I know this is an old thread, so I hope someone can still answer.

[Malfunction]

Originally Posted by graywolf

Would be interested in hearing your experience with this if it reduced the Wiz.bin for you and the RAM usage.

Sage is using 6259 megs, Wiz.bin didn't shrink much.

[VCRUser]

I'm thinking of trying this to fix some of my database issues, but where is the .jar file being referenced? I assume I need to replace one JAR with another one (and in what location?) as well as make the .properties changes described?