OK, I set up to test this based on Brad's suggestions to first record a program, then to baseline mythcommflag's fps performance, the to watch a program while again running mythcommflag against anoither recorded show of the same resolution. In this case I used 720p shows recorded off FOX.
Here's the baseline,...but it gets more interesting,... mythcommflag 2005-02-16 02:46:37.067 mythcommflag version: 0.17.20050130-1 www.mythtv.org 2005-02-16 02:46:37.068 Enabled verbose msgs :important MythTV Commercial Flagger, started at Wed Feb 16 02:46:37 2005 Flagging commercial breaks for: ALL Un-flagged programs ChanID Start Time Title Breaks ------ -------------- ----------------------------------------- ------ 1031 20050215200000 House 99%/154fps2005-02-16 03:09:52.080 Finished commercial break flagging at Wed Feb 16 03:09:53 2005 --- While running against another 720p show while watching a 1080i ( 9 news here locally), I was seeing about 80/fps and a nearly solid on disk light on my system. So I ran TOP ( ya, I know it's not too accurate but it's close enough) and noted that IDLE time was bouncing between 11 and 34% . top - 23:32:03 up 27 min, 2 users, load average: 3.06, 3.14, 2.62 Tasks: 87 total, 2 running, 85 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu(s): 46.2% us, 1.7% sy, 38.6% ni, 12.2% id, 1.3% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% Mem: 516036k total, 512492k used, 3544k free, 1288k buffers Swap: 1092380k total, 161928k used, 930452k free, 328156k cached PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 4622 root 32 17 188m 101m 23m R 39.1 20.2 10:38.12 mythcommflag 4678 root 15 0 207m 59m 180m S 8.3 11.8 1:44.02 X 4975 root 15 0 219m 74m 91m S 0.7 14.7 0:02.60 mythfrontend This strongly suggests that these processes are more disk bound ( or Bus Bound) than processor bound, at least in my case. The disk channel ran out of steam long before the Processor and Graphics card did. My guess is that if my processor wasn't pegged, the 6600GT probably wasn't either. My basic system specs are below; MSI 865PE Mobo with a 2.8GHZ Proc 512MB ddr-333 Memory ATA/100 Disks ( Seagate 120GB and 160GB) nVidia 6600GT Graphics Card pcHDTV HD-3000 HD Tuner Card. I've been meaning to pick up a couple of SATA/150 drives since this Mobo supports 2. That should help the PCI channels breath a bit and relieve some of the disk bottleneck. We'll see how well MSI's controller mange this I guess. At any rate, I'll rerun the test against the faster drives in a few weeks if folks are interested. So far though, I am very impressed with what the 6600 brings to the table. I'd love to find the ceiling but think that new drivers from nVidia and a stronger disk channel are going to be minimum to get it there. I'm avioding overclocking though I might start jackin with that if the disk channel doen't result in slamming the proc. Anyone else have testing idea's? -Blair _______________________________________________ mythtv-users mailing list mythtv-users@mythtv.org http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
