Dear Mediaportal developpers..... (1 Viewer)

[te3hpurp]

Hi

First of all, i think you are doing really great job, Bigh thanks for this product.
Please take no offence, but once again i was going trough the source code of
TvEngine3 & Mediaportal itself, and i noticed that there was a huge amount og
"GC.Collect & GC.WaitforPendingFinalizers" lines in the code. My humble opinion is that it's not a good thing at all.

I've been sitting in same table with some some "MS Evangelist" to talk about this
same issue. I had those lines in my code guite often too, while i was creating a
"Language lab Media Assistant". Within few hours they made me belive that GC itself knows when to run, better than I do.
So many GC.Collect lines implicate usually Desing flaw, or a bug that is hiding behind these lines. For example
ReleaseComObject is missing/used in wrong place etc. So what i did was to remove them all, and started hunting bugs from my code. Actually there was less than i expected, but the impact was much smoothly running
software. Mysterious freezes were gone just by removing all GC:Collets. Speed increased guite a lot.

So i took a Mp & TvEngine code and removed them all by Find & Replace just to look the impact. I'm glad i did.
Now my Mp runs much better, smoother. One "maybe a bug" rised, but i haven't studiet it yet. So i've only tried Mp, not TvEngine yet. In TvEngine there was lot less of those lines. GC.:Collect uses lot of Cpu time, and if used wrongly it might even kill something it should not.

The only place i can think of where GC.Collect could be usefull might be a game with lot lot of data in memory, and you might want to run GC.Collect in the end of Game Levels, before loading new level.

But hey, It's your product, You decide.


regs,
te3hpurp

 

[tourettes]

True, those should be removed. Hopefully it happens some stage, but definately not for 1.0 as removing those will cause serious issues (that heve been hided with those ugly lines of GC).

The truth is that they shouldnt ever been added, but removing those are really risky and some issues might pop up many months after the removal is done.

http://codebetter.com/blogs/steve.hebert/archive/2005/07/21/129634.aspx

 

[te3hpurp]

That is probably true. As you have a quite big audience to serve. . I just might do my own builds for myself as for now it seems to suite me fine. I've been using this version just 3 days, so i might return to originals if some serious happens. Again, if not, then i'll just make my own builds.

Keep up the good work !

 

[xvffx]

Im wondering if we should "test" a version of your build and report back some of the hicups encounter. (would they both have the same bugs or not ?)
I don't know if this would help test the MP's builds against the builds without the bandaids ?

Vff

 

[tourettes]

Im wondering if we should "test" a version of your build and report back some of the hicups encounter. (would they both have the same bugs or not ?)
I don't know if this would help test the MP's builds against the builds without the bandaids ?

Idea is good, if all MP users would do such testing, but the results wont be good as most likely less than 0.01% of the user base will do such testing so the results are only pin pointing the most visible and common new issues.

Of course such testing is not vain in any case, so I cant see any harm done. So, when 1.0 is out such test build might be a good idea (if there is enough users willing to test it and if they are testing two exact same SVN version codes with only that one difference.).

Especially stress testing will be needed, like start different videos 200 times and see the results as thats were the differences most likely are. Usually users arent keen to do such kind of testing

 

[te3hpurp]

Seidelin, and others..

Here are patches against build 20848.
i cannot access my hotmail account for some wreid reason, and i cannot use work account
cos it's not allowed, so i just put patches here. Grab them if you want them, and i'll clean my attachment
for a week or so.

But doing wider range of testing should be orgnized by Portal personel, as there is no point
of filing bugs from the code, which is not officially accepted by portal personel.

regs,
te3hpurp

 

[Seidelin]

I'll do some experiments with this sometime, just to see how bad things go

 

[disaster123]

I'll also do some experiments - as soon as public SVN is updated. SVN 20848 has too many bugs for me with liveTV.

 

[te3hpurp]

I'll also do some experiments - as soon as public SVN is updated. SVN 20848 has too many bugs for me with liveTV.

Yes it has. This way i can almost live with it. For me it's not WAF that counts, but KAF(Kids Acceptance Factor) . Mp should stay up and change channels smoothly. That works now, if i don't do anything else. Watching recorded tv, or movie kills TvEngine, but i ain't got no time to take a good look for that. And It is restarted automatically,so i'll manage till there is something better.


regs.

 

[disaster123]

mhm no not that problem - it is running fine. But when a channel is recorded and i would like to switch of it livetv is stopped. This is new since SVN 20848 and at the moment the sourceforge svn is not updated since 2 days :-(