Mailing List Archive

perf survey
OK, I want to get to the bottom of my performance issues. (I get
unpleasant jitter with any codec at any resolution higher than
352x480).

To that end, if you have a jitter/hang/stutter-free life *while
recording one thing and watching another* on an Athlon XP 1800 with
bt878 and gforce4 chips, at 480x480 or larger with any codec, I'm
interested in learning:

- What codec are you using?

- Are you using the nvidia binary driver?

- Is your mysql colocated on the server with mythtv?

- What is your disk speed? 7200? 5400? Other?

- What is your disk buffer size? 2MB? Other?
[ cat /proc/ide/hda/cache ]

- What are your dma, multcount, and prefetch settings?
[ hdparm /dev/hda ]

- What are your "elevator" settings? [ elvtune /dev/hda1 ]

- What is your CPU and bus speed? [ cat /proc/cpuinfo ]

- What is your memory type, speed, configuration, and size?

- What is your motherboard chipset? [ a function of `cat /proc/pci` ]

- What is your kernel version? [ uname -a ]

- What is your compiler version? [ gcc -v ]

--
Grant Taylor - gtaylor<at>picante.com - http://www.picante.com/~gtaylor/
Linux Printing Website and HOWTO: http://www.linuxprinting.org/
Re: perf survey [ In reply to ]
On Wednesday 18 September 2002 04:52 pm, Grant Taylor wrote:
> OK, I want to get to the bottom of my performance issues. (I get
> unpleasant jitter with any codec at any resolution higher than
> 352x480).
>
> To that end, if you have a jitter/hang/stutter-free life *while
> recording one thing and watching another* on an Athlon XP 1800 with
> bt878 and gforce4 chips, at 480x480 or larger with any codec, I'm
> interested in learning:
>
> - What codec are you using?

Tested recording at 640x480 with mpeg4 with a bitrate of 2600. Playback is a
480x480 rtjpeg file.. Average jitter is 5ms -- basically unnoticeable. CPU
usage is 65%.

> - Are you using the nvidia binary driver?

Yes, version 29.60 (haven't recompiled a kernel since 31.23 came out).
AGP 4x, Fast Writes, and SBA enabled. Using the nvidia AGP driver, and not
the kernel driver.

> - Is your mysql colocated on the server with mythtv?

yes.

> - What is your disk speed? 7200? 5400? Other?

7200

http://www.maxtor.com/en/support/products/desktop/performance_drives/diamondmax_plus_d740x_ultra_ata_133/index.htm
is the drive (sorry for the long url)

Running it off of the ata-100 controller, have the ata-133 controller turned
off (takes _forever_ to scan on boot).

> - What is your disk buffer size? 2MB? Other?
> [ cat /proc/ide/hda/cache ]

2 MB.

> - What are your dma, multcount, and prefetch settings?
> [ hdparm /dev/hda ]

multcount = 16 (on)
using_dma = 1 (on)
readahead = 8 (on)

> - What are your "elevator" settings? [ elvtune /dev/hda1 ]

read_latency: 2048
write_latency: 8192
max_bomb_segments: 0

> - What is your CPU and bus speed? [ cat /proc/cpuinfo ]

cpu MHz : 1536.833
bus speed is 133, o'course

> - What is your memory type, speed, configuration, and size?

2 256MB PC2100 DIMMS. Running at CAS2, aggressive timings. The motherboard
does use a hypertransport link to RAM,

> - What is your motherboard chipset? [ a function of `cat /proc/pci` ]

NVidia 415-D

> - What is your kernel version? [ uname -a ]

Linux Alioth 2.4.20-pre2-ac3 #1 Thu Aug 15 17:20:36 EDT 2002 i686

> - What is your compiler version? [ gcc -v ]

Reading specs from /usr/lib/gcc-lib/i386-linux/2.95.4/specs
gcc version 2.95.4 20011002 (Debian prerelease)

Something you didn't ask:

hdparm -tT /dev/hda/dev/hda:
Timing buffer-cache reads: 128 MB in 0.36 seconds =355.56 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 1.59 seconds = 40.25 MB/sec

Isaac