MediaPortal performance tweaks for dummies? (1 Viewer)

[tourettes]

Wow I saw the thread title and came here to learn some tweaks how ironic that there are none here only "your hardware is the issue". Since the question was about some tweaks could we have some please? I have a QUAD i7 running 3.6 GHZ with 12 GIGS DDR3 1600 Ram and have DUAL NVIDIA GTX 460's and a 750 gig and 1 Terabyte WD BLACK SATA Drive running Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit. I have some performance issues that are very small but annoying. It seems anytime I launch MP it stutters for about a minute. Also when I go into a menu then come out it hangs for a few seconds. Please dont tell me its my hardware LOL....

well in a way it is , but the reason at the moment is MP itself, just wait untill the beta comes out and all will be fine.
timeshifting makes your harddrive go nuts at the moment, in the new beta is a patch/fix included which reduces diskactivity for 95%

1) Current MP release has no timeshifting related performance issues on average HW, much less with the HW that ap90033 has.
2) If the issue happens right after the startup it wont be anything related to timeshifting (it would be constant issue during live tv)

My assumption is that some 3rd party plugin is accessing the HD right after the bootup, but since not enough information was provided it is just a wild guess.

 

[limpwhizkid]

Wow I saw the thread title and came here to learn some tweaks how ironic that there are none here only "your hardware is the issue". Since the question was about some tweaks could we have some please? I have a QUAD i7 running 3.6 GHZ with 12 GIGS DDR3 1600 Ram and have DUAL NVIDIA GTX 460's and a 750 gig and 1 Terabyte WD BLACK SATA Drive running Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit. I have some performance issues that are very small but annoying. It seems anytime I launch MP it stutters for about a minute. Also when I go into a menu then come out it hangs for a few seconds. Please dont tell me its my hardware LOL....

well in a way it is , but the reason at the moment is MP itself, just wait untill the beta comes out and all will be fine.
timeshifting makes your harddrive go nuts at the moment, in the new beta is a patch/fix included which reduces diskactivity for 95%

1) Current MP release has no timeshifting related performance issues on average HW, much less with the HW that ap90033 has.
2) If the issue happens right after the startup it wont be anything related to timeshifting (it would be constant issue during live tv)

My assumption is that some 3rd party plugin is accessing the HD right after the bootup, but since not enough information was provided it is just a wild guess.

1) this fix is into the beta ? , is it only for streaming to clients then ? and not local play ?

The root of the problem is that tswriter, tsreader and streamingserver make a lot of unnecessary and an excessive number of read & write disk operations with live tv. Viewing a HD channel on my setup caused MP and tvserver to perform over 11,000 disk IO operations per second (very high for even a fast disk). This patch removes the unnecessary read/write calls and also reduces the frequency that packets are written to disk (every 43 packets instead of 10 - see below). These optimisations reduce the disk IOs by about 90% to ~1,200 per second on a HD channel.

The second cause of the problem is the precise timings that streamingserver seems to require to reliably stream live tv. In this patch i've modified tswriter to dump 43 packets at a time instead of 10. 43 packets equals 8084 bytes which exactly matches the buffer size that streamingserver uses. This, coupled with the reduced number of disk IOs means that the strict timing of streamingserver is matched almost perfectly. The difference has been massive on my setup.

2) if it is only after startup , maybe he just started his machine up , and its still in the background starting other processes.
but there is so much that could affect his performance its impossible to give any directions..

thats probably why everybody says -->> upgrade the hardware

 

[ap90033]

Oh when will a new beta be out?

 

[Holzi]

AW: MediaPortal performance tweaks for dummies?

It's scheduled for 2011-04-14.
See -> Roadmap - MediaPortal Bugtracker

 

[ap90033]

I am a noob so please forgive me, how can I keep track of whats coming? I would love to know what the new version(s) will have new and when they are coming..

 

[rekenaar]

how can I keep track of whats coming?

Roadmap - MediaPortal Bugtracker

Keep in mind that the scheduled dates are very rough estimates and can be changed at last minute depending on developers/testers free time and depending on issues discovered.

 

[ap90033]

Ok *fingers crossed* Thanks!

 

[SwissBuster]

Re: AW: MediaPortal performance tweaks for dummies?

A quick update from me which I hope will get this thread back on track. My learnings/summary so far:
1. Common quick-fix advice is to update hardware which may or may not be the right solution for your system. I suggest you try other tweaks before investing.
2. Updating to the latest version of MP and skins, plug-ins etc. is usually helpful.
3. Cutting out any unneccessary crap running on your system is a good idea.
4. The skin can effect performance. Try different skins to see how your performance is affected.
5. Codecs are a key variable. The SAF 5 package seems to be a successful solution for many setups.
6. Refresh rates tweaking?

Following advice on here, I installed the SAF5 codec pack, and selected the suggested codecs. This gives a nearly perfect result: CPU load is down to about 20%. SD TV is working perfectly and stutter free, channel switching seems much faster and the screen looks crisper. HD TV is also running well, where before it often froze MP. It is working pretty much flawlessly on BBC HD and ITV HD (true HD) but less well on HD Suisse and German HD Channels (which are 1220 x 720 (?), so not true HD).

So, what happens next?
1. The next MP update (due today!) promises a step-change in performance. So, I'm first in line for this installation.
2. For my stuttering HD channels, pressing "!" shows I am dropping about 10% of frames (and have jagged lines whatever these mean). My research points towards refresh rate issues. What can I do to improve this?
3. Hardware: Someone earlier mentioned installing a solid state HDD. How would this improve things and how would I do this exactly?

Any advice is much appreciated.

 

[limpwhizkid]

Re: AW: MediaPortal performance tweaks for dummies?

A quick update from me which I hope will get this thread back on track. My learnings/summary so far:
1. Common quick-fix advice is to update hardware which may or may not be the right solution for your system. I suggest you try other tweaks before investing.
2. Updating to the latest version of MP and skins, plug-ins etc. is usually helpful.
3. Cutting out any unneccessary crap running on your system is a good idea.
4. The skin can effect performance. Try different skins to see how your performance is affected.
5. Codecs are a key variable. The SAF 5 package seems to be a successful solution for many setups.
6. Refresh rates tweaking?

Following advice on here, I installed the SAF5 codec pack, and selected the suggested codecs. This gives a nearly perfect result: CPU load is down to about 20%. SD TV is working perfectly and stutter free, channel switching seems much faster and the screen looks crisper. HD TV is also running well, where before it often froze MP. It is working pretty much flawlessly on BBC HD and ITV HD (true HD) but less well on HD Suisse and German HD Channels (which are 1220 x 720 (?), so not true HD).

So, what happens next?
1. The next MP update (due today!) promises a step-change in performance. So, I'm first in line for this installation.
2. For my stuttering HD channels, pressing "!" shows I am dropping about 10% of frames (and have jagged lines whatever these mean). My research points towards refresh rate issues. What can I do to improve this?
3. Hardware: Someone earlier mentioned installing a solid state HDD. How would this improve things and how would I do this exactly?

Any advice is much appreciated.

1.
2. never seen this on my systems cant help ..
3. buy a reasonable ssd (suggestion vectrex pro 3 @ 120gb- reads 550mb a sec writes 500 mb sec).
use an imaging program like ghost to copy your current systemdrive to the SSD.
boot again
let the timeshift files remain on the SSD (faster zapping for sure).
i would then use the old normal drive for recordings

cheers

 

[tourettes]

Re: AW: MediaPortal performance tweaks for dummies?

let the timeshift files remain on the SSD (faster zapping for sure).

I don't know how many times I have had to correct that false illusion, but the slow zapping performance is not down to slow HD performance. You can check that directly from the TsReader.log - there is only few ms spent on the actual seeking operation when zapping happens. Other things likce Tv card, codecs, MP code etc. are the 99% of the zapping time.