Role of Seeker and playback stutters?

[amac]

I've just started investigating this on my pvr. A number of people over the last 3 years (based on my searches of the forum) have complained about stuttering during playback. I'm sure there have been many causes.

I'm commenting in this thread because you have mentioned one key symptom that my pvr shares. It stutters every 5 minutes. So I turned on the Sage debug log and found that something called 'seeker' is waking every 5 minutes to do some housekeeping chores (the first message in the log is 'seeker awoken'. I plan on sending SAge an email on this shortly.

The curious part of the log is that after seeker has finished its chores, another line in the log states that seeker will go back to sleep for 'n' minutes. This 'n' minutes in my case works out to be the number of minutes that should elapse to reach 6 minutes before the hour. Not sure of the significance.

However it actually wakes up precisely 5 minutes later (give or take a few microseconds) and goes about its housekeeping chores yet again. Each time that happens, I get a short stutter as it looks for partial files to delete and who knows what else?

Can anyone offer an explanation before I contact Sage?

Narflex? Opus? Anyone?

[amac]

Creating a thread to raise the profile of this problem. Every 5 minutes of playback SageTV stutters for a fraction of a second. I've set seeker/periodically_scan_library=false in sage.properties. I thought that would solve it but to no avail.

Here's an extract of my last debug log. This repeats every 5 minutes.
How do I stop it?
Why is it occuring?

Debug log extract:

Sat 3/18 7:58:08.330 Seeker awoken
Sat 3/18 7:58:08.332 MARK 1 currRecord=null enc=Hauppauge WinTV PVR PCI II Capture clients=[] ir=false
Sat 3/18 7:58:08.334 Seeker in AUTOMATIC mode nextRecord=A[1644046,1643879,"Battlestar Galactica",17609@0318.20:00,60] nextTTA=43311668
Sat 3/18 7:58:08.335 newRecord=null
Sat 3/18 7:58:08.336 NOTHING TO RECORD FOR NOW...
Sat 3/18 7:58:08.357 VF processing job null nPlayin=true
Sat 3/18 7:58:08.358 isRec=false rd=1798933 base=953075
Sat 3/18 7:58:08.359 VF thread is now waiting for 0:14:05.607
Sat 3/18 7:58:08.491 Seeker clearing unwanted and partial files...
Sat 3/18 7:58:08.853 Seeker waiting for 716 mins.
Sat 3/18 7:58:23.034 Screen Saver Timeout expired....tv=true playin=true fs=true sleepy=false currSS=false
Sat 3/18 7:59:23.043 Screen Saver Timeout expired....tv=true playin=true fs=true sleepy=false currSS=false
Sat 3/18 8:00:23.048 Screen Saver Timeout expired....tv=true playin=true fs=true sleepy=false currSS=false
Sat 3/18 8:01:03.674 Ministry is waiting for 180 sec
Sat 3/18 8:01:23.053 Screen Saver Timeout expired....tv=true playin=true fs=true sleepy=false currSS=false
Sat 3/18 8:02:23.059 Screen Saver Timeout expired....tv=true playin=true fs=true sleepy=false currSS=false
Sat 3/18 8:03:08.856 Seeker awoken
Sat 3/18 8:03:08.859 MARK 1 currRecord=null enc=Hauppauge WinTV PVR PCI II Capture clients=[] ir=false
Sat 3/18 8:03:08.860 Seeker in AUTOMATIC mode nextRecord=A[1644046,1643879,"Battlestar Galactica",17609@0318.20:00,60] nextTTA=43011141
Sat 3/18 8:03:08.861 newRecord=null

[jptaz]

I believe the seeker schedules new recordings and checks on the status of current recordings. I am fairly certain that the seeker is no longer scanning your library for partials even though it says it is. I downloaded FileMon from sysinternals.com and it definitely was not scanning them with this setting...and when it is set to true it is clearly checking files every 5 minutes.

Hope this helps,
John

[amac]

Thanks John. That's more info but doesn't address the issue. Why is seeker waking? Even if it isn't actually doing the scan, it results in very short stutters. You will note from the log that it claims it is going to sleep.

While at this stage I can only point the finger at a Sage issue, I'm starting to wonder if perhaps the IR.exe driver might be doing some sort of 'ping' (keep alive strategy?) that inadvertently wakes the seeker.

[Narflex]

Submit a bug report on this. We'll send you something so we can analyze what's causing this.

It's normal for the Seeker to wake every 5 minutes like that, but it shouldn't cause any impact on what you're viewing. So we'd like to fix this.

[amac]

Well I can now validate even more that Sage Support works. As instructed by Narflex, I did indeed submit a bug report on this issue. After 2 weeks of excellent work with Sage staff, they located the issue in their code that was causing the stutter every 5 minutes.

Apparently the little bit of code executed in 1 msec on their test box and took 750 msec on mine! Now it's only 15 times slower ...I still don't get why they need to do calculations every 5 minutes, but that's their business (as long as it doesn't affect me :-) )

Support has indicated that the code fix will be in the next beta (4.1.13)! Hopefully it will help a few other people too ...

That was my last issue with Sage so I'm an even happier user!