Performance of HD extender?

[KJake]

Originally Posted by KJake

For those having a problem, try turning off Offline Files. In any Explorer Window, Click Tools > Folder Options, click the Offline Files tab, and then uncheck the Enable Offline Files option (you can also goto Control Panel and open the Folder Options dialog there). Reboot for fun. This has sped things up for me tremendously. Offline files will cache your network shares. All of my storage is on a different server and that share is 4.3TB. I used the File Monitor from SysInternals to track this down; it was showing that when I encountered a spinning circle that there were a lot of reads going to C:\Windows\CSC\00000001, which is part of the Offline Folders cache. Thanks to Sage Support for suggesting this. I'm still having a few spinning circles and I'm going to spend some more time today to try and track it down.

My problem is fixed!
It seems I am to blame for this...

I bought two extenders and one of them replaced the PC client in my living room. Well, that PC client used to be the SageTV server a while back. It turns out that there were still old recordings on that PC and when I turned it off to install the HDE, that is when all of my problems started. I followed the FAQ entry (after putting the PC back on the network) to move those recordings to my new SageTV recordings directory and everything is perfect again.

I think the reason that I saw the hits to the Offline Files cache is because Windows was trying to locate these files and couldn't contact the host for them so started searching though the Offline Files cache. When I turned that off, it just allowed Sage to receive a time-out faster from the OS, thus my initial result of less wait time and less circles.

My advice for others, if you're having an issue like this with the EventThread Hang Detected messages, is to make sure that all your recording files are reachable by your SageTV server.

If that doesn't work, perform these steps and send the output to SageTV support. It should help them narrow down where your problem might be faster.

• Switch to the default STV (no imports).
• Turn off all unsupported extras.
• In SageTV, goto Setup > Help > System Information screen and hit the Info button (defaults to CTRL-I on your keyboard). A txt file named "SystemInfo.txt" will be created in your SageTV installation folder. If using Vista, this file will probably be placed in C:\Users\me\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files\SageTV.
• Shutdown Sage (service/clients).
• Put ui/thread_hang_delay_to_dump=2000 in your Sage.properties.
• Put debug_logging=TRUE in your Sage.properties (if it isn't already).
• Disable the Sage Service so it starts in the standalone app mode.
• Enable the console window. Go to start, run and type in regedit. Browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Frey Technologies\Common. Right-click on the Common folder and select New DWORD Value. Name it "consolewin" without the quotes and hit enter. Now double click on consolewin and change the value from 0 to 1.
• Start SageTV.
• Right-click the console window title and select Properties->Layout and change the screen buffer size height to 9999 and adjust the window size width to something that fits your desktop (126 works for me). Click OK.
• Now go to your HDE and reproduce the spinning circle. I could do this in as little as 3 steps, on command, every time.
• As soon as the spinning circle starts on the screen, you will notice Java errors streaming in the debug console.
• Go to the debug console and press CTRL-BREAK (Pause) and that will print a full stack dump out in the console.
• Right-click the debug console title and click Edit > Select All, Right-click the debug console title and click Edit > Copy. Paste this into Notepad and save it.
• Now zip up the debug console output you just got, the sagetv_0.txt debug log and the SystemInfo.txt into a zip archive as they will be pretty big.
• Send your zip file off to support at sagetv.com, after you have submitted a support request on the website (or if you already have one open with them on this issue).

I don't mean to speak for SageTV support in any way, these are just the steps that I took that in the end helped SageTV support let me know where the issue was and where to look to fix it.

Hope this helps.