Circle of death

[tcomeau16]

Having a major problem right now. Anytime I try to fast forward or rewind I get the circle of death, Sage TV hangs and I have to kill the program. How do I fix this?

Using SageTV 6.5, Hauppage WinTV HD-PVR with Rogers DCT-6200 HD box, Vista 64-bit.

[mistergq]

A couple of things have improved my system, upgrading to 3gigs of ram (technically its 4, but the computer only sees 3), there was a java update, and upgrading to 6.5.

[tcomeau16]

Originally Posted by mistergq

A couple of things have improved my system, upgrading to 3gigs of ram (technically its 4, but the computer only sees 3), there was a java update, and upgrading to 6.5.

We have 4 Gigs of Ram, we have the latest version of SageTV, I installed the latest Java update, removed old JRE files using JavaRa. Nothing has worked so far. This problem just started happening really bad today, first noticed it last week.

[mistergq]

have you defraged the hard drive(s) lately?

[QueOnda]

Try increasing the Java Heap Size

[scat]

When I am using the: SageTV MPEG Video Decoder
I have to turn off : hardware acceleration
and then I have no Circle issues.

Scat

[tcomeau16]

We reformatted the hard drive and all is well again. Probably should have tried reinstalling SageTV before doing that, but whatever.

[joe123]

When you reformated your disk, did you start with a new SageTV setup altogether, or did you save and restored your Wiz.bin file?

Reason I am asking is becuase I am having the same Circle of Death issues and I have done all of the above (minus reformat) and my SageTV Circle of Death is getting pretty bad.

The only thing I can think of, is that my Wiz.bin file is very large. I have been running SageTV for many years and I am wondering if it has so much stuff in it, like shows we have watched, favorites, etc, that it is slowing things down a lot. Any time we add or remove a recording, Circle of Death takes minutes.

Anyone else having Circle of Death issues and any correlation to the size/age of their Wiz.bin file?

Our PVR is dedicated to recording only. We use SageTV Theater media and MVP to view the shows on our TVs.

I should also add that my Win.bin file is about ~30MB. We have lots of mp3 files.

[mickp]

My experience is that disk related errors are very often the cause of 'circle of death' problems in Sage. Check out this post for a detailed description of what to look for.

Mick.

[joe123]

Thanks for the link. Disk errors will certainly slow down everything, but I think that's not it with my case.

As a test, I told SageTV not to import my mp3 collection which is a large collection and my Wiz.bin file was reduced significantly. My Circle of Death is shorter now, so things are better (faster), but still some what slow.

The slowness was not a suddend thing, it just got progressively worse with time. Again, I think due to the many years of data it has collected (shows we have watched, etc).

So I am thinking that the size of the Wiz.bin file does indeed have a directly correlation with the Circle of Death. Makes sense to me - the more it has, the harder it becomes for SageTV to process all of the data deciding what to schedule to record, etc.

Anyone else here using SageTV for many years with large Wiz.bin and getting the Circle of Death?

[paulbeers]

5 years+ on my wizbin. 10,000 mp3's. 500+ DVD's, etc. etc. No slowness at all.

[joe123]

Originally Posted by paulbeers

5 years+ on my wizbin. 10,000 mp3's. 500+ DVD's, etc. etc. No slowness at all.

Cool thanks, that helps. I have about the same amount of recordings - 7TB.

How big is your favorites? I have about 70+ favorites. Some are Keywords searches in my Favorites, so I am wondering if that's the cause of my delays? With so many favorites and channels to process, that may take a while.

[APillowOfClouds]

I have had a similar problem although at first I thought it was a disk problem or something because it happened on my old server that I was just about to abandon because of a disk with some bad sectors and some other issues.

However, I just did a fresh sage install on a fresh windows xp install (although I did move over my wiz.bin)

What I found is this: On my clients, which include 2 pc's and an extender, I can ffwd and rew all day long with no problem. However, on the server, if I flip between a few recorded shows and do some ffwd'ing and rewinding, within a couple of minutes I get to a situation where when I press stop, the video and sound keep playing but I get the ring of death, the timeline stops moving and none of the controls work. I have to end task.

[davephan]

I had the endless circle problem in the past. I recovered to an image when SageTV was working normally. I don't know what caused the problem, but the problem was gone after the recovery, and the problem did not return.

Dave