MythTV Reloaded – Day 18

So today I was doing a bit of stress testing of the frontend system to make sure that it was ready for me to put back into use.  It turns out there were still a couple of bugs to work out.  You may recall from this blog post that I ended up using Fedora 15 with KDE as the desktop environment.  It turns out that under certain circumstances there is a problem with this setup using 100% of one of the CPU cores.  I happen to run into this situation.  I didn’t notice it right away since it’s a dual core system and the other core is sitting idle most of the time but I did setup the system monitoring widget and noticed that one of the cores was completely pegged out.  Running top showed me that it was “plasmadesktop” that was hogging all of the resources.  A quick Google search showed me that this happens to people running the version of KDE that comes with Fedora 15 and newer.

It sounds like this happens when a system wakes up from suspend and is running multiple “panels” – the bars at the top and bottom of the screen – and various widgets.  Basically, this is resolved by disabling or removing the various widgets and panels that were added in addition to the original ones.  Since this is a dedicated frontend I removed everything that I had added, including the system monitor that I added that found this problem in the first place.  Once this was done I put the system to sleep a couple of times and made sure that I did not have high CPU usage when it woke up (or a couple hours later).  It seems like removing the panels and widgets took care of the problem for me.

In addition to this CPU issue I was also able to make MythTV stay on top of everything else so when watching TV it’s the only thing that you see.  I was also able to make the frontend app start automatically at login by following the directions on the Fedora Installation Guide.  I still need to tweak the remote config file, but that’ll be for another day.  

That’s it for now.  Hopefully no more surprises.