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Slow response on playback

H

Hugo

New Member
Hello,

At the weekend, the Humax (CFW 3.13) started behaving strangely during playback. Watching live TV is fine and the box responds as normal, but when I try and play a recording, there is an approximately 30 second delay before it starts playing during which time the box doesn't respond to any input. Once it starts playing, it then has the same 30 second lag when pressing pause or stop. Thought it might be an internal hard drive issue, but the same happens when playing from an external drive. May be unrelated, but I have noticed that it takes longer to 'click off' after putting into standby (from 20ish seconds to nearly a minute).

Has anyone else experienced this? I've had a search of the forums, but not found anything similar to this.

I guess the next step might be a factory reset, but just wanted some reassurance that this doesn't delete any old recordings on the internal HDD :unsure:.

Hope you can help. Cheers!
 
Hugo said:
At the weekend, the Humax (CFW 3.13) started behaving strangely during playback. Watching live TV is fine and the box responds as normal, but when I try and play a recording, there is an approximately 30 second delay before it starts playing during which time the box doesn't respond to any input. Once it starts playing, it then has the same 30 second lag when pressing pause or stop. Thought it might be an internal hard drive issue, but the same happens when playing from an external drive.
Click to expand...
As you have the custom firmware then post the output from the Disk diagnostics (under Diagnostics). I wouldn't bother with a reset to default at this stage but for future reference it won't delete recordings.
 
MartinLiddle said:
As you have the custom firmware then post the output from the Disk diagnostics (under Diagnostics). I wouldn't bother with a reset to default at this stage but for future reference it won't delete recordings.
Click to expand...
OK. Thanks for that. Will do that this evening.
 
Thanks @MartinLiddle and @Black Hole . It was indeed a hard drive problem. 'Pending sector count' and 'offline sector count' were both showing 1 in the SMART data. I followed the excellent disk recovery guide above and now we're up and running again (affected file was redring.log which I assume is a non-critical file)
MartinLiddle said:
What capacity is the hard drive? The real concern is the pending sector/Offline sector count which probably explains your freezing issue; hopefully running fixdisk as Ezra has suggested will sort that out. 2013 reallocated sectors is an indication that the hard drive is getting past middle age and you need to think about replacing it in the next few months. Replacing the hard drive is a straightforward process.
Click to expand...
Next step, hard drive replacement/upgrade :cheers:. Thanks again.
 
MartinLiddle said:
I wouldn't necessarily be in a rush to replace the hard drive. What are the counts of reallocated sectors and power on hours?
Click to expand...
Reallocated sector count: 0
Power on hours: 6866

I assume that means I'm doing alright. I've seen a lot higher power on hours while browsing the forum. And I just noticed that your post I mentioned above said 2013 reallocated sectors. Not sure my 1 is as dramatic as I first thought.
 
everthewatcher said:
IIRC that's been the affected file here on the last two occasions. Coincidence?
Click to expand...
When the redring package is installed, some powerful magic is hooked into the Humax TV process which writes to redring.log, I guess in the main thread of set-top box GUI processing, and this could happen quite often, depending on the log verbosity setting and what the box is doing.

On this basis, if there's a problem writing to a redring.log, the GUI would hang as observed. That could explain why this is a file that's likely to cause a noticeable glitch in case of a disk error.

Perhaps if a syslog daemon was introduced, a disk error would mean that the daemon would hang while the Humax TV process carries on piping log entries to it?
 
RobH1 said:
Can you explain that please?
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A lot of the packages have easy to set settings that can be accessed on the web interface.

To see what these are for the redring package you will need first to open the web-interface and then select 'Settings'.
There will be a list of packages that have settings. but at this stage you will only be able to see the 'General Settings'. To see the settings for redwing click on the row that is labelled 'Setting for redring package'. The log verbosity settings are near the top.

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On the couple of occasions where I have suffered severe slow downs and a single sector fault - the fault has been found in a log file.

It is not the number of faulty sectors that is the issue but the frequency of access to the file affected that causes problems, an error in a recording might spoil viewing but only of that programme, while log files are frequently written to but rarely read so tend to slow the whole system down but renaming the faulty file cures the problem

Redring.log was the problem on at least one occasion
 
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I followed prpr's philosophy by limiting all my log files to 256 kb and keeping the last 10. Perhaps this might help with the 'writing to logs' problem ?
 
/df said:
Perhaps if a syslog daemon was introduced, a disk error would mean that the daemon would hang while the Humax TV process carries on piping log entries to it?
Click to expand...
Not that I know much about Linux internals, but this sounds a good plan (unless running daemons would slug the system?). It's not a good situation if running CF increases the likelihood of hangs/crashes/glitches in settop.
 
@ Luke, thanks for the explanation, I do understand the package principles although I've not had reason to change much since my original packages download as I've experienced few problems for the limited use I make of them. I keep things simple.
I did not understand the term 'log verbosity', hence the query.
 
peterworks said:
I followed prpr's philosophy by limiting all my log files to 256 kb and keeping the last 10. Perhaps this might help with the 'writing to logs' problem ?
Click to expand...
I only keep 5 archive logs and limit the size to 100K but still have a month or more data in most logs - more than enough for any debugging, nobody is going to investigate something that happened more than a month ago! My activity.log archive goes back a full year!
 
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