# Too Much load on CPU - What effect?



## benallenuk (Aug 1, 2005)

Hi guys, Im interested to know the effects of the following.

1. Recording (basic - Analogue Cable)
2. Watching a recording
3. And things lot to be talked of here

All at the same time. 

I live in a shared house, so have given access to recording via my home LAN. I know that the tivo-cpu is max'd because the programm being recorded, when played jumps and distorts every now and then.

All my hacks are backgrounded!

Will I kill my tivo if I continue to put such a high load upon it, will it kill my drive?

Cheers

Ben


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## iankb (Oct 9, 2000)

It shouldn't kill anything, 'though you shouldn't expect too much of a 50MHz RISC processor.

An overload will affect playback, but doesn't normally affect recordings. This is because of the higher priority for recordings, and the fact that the hardware encoder writes directly to disk, and not via the CPU. It's possible that it could increase the level of 'audio holes', which might affect synchronisation of archived recordings; 'though this is just uneducated guesswork since I don't know how whether audio streams are handled any differently to video streams.


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## benallenuk (Aug 1, 2005)

Thanks Ian, a good insight. Could it be a problem with disk access. Recording, Playback and 2MB/sec extraction?

Thanks

Ben


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## johala_reewi (Oct 30, 2002)

When the CPU is maxed out, time critical applications won't be able to get CPU power when they need it so things like watched and recorded programmes will freeze and jump. Non time critical applications like tivoweb, file transfer, etc. will just run slower. Maxing out the CPU shouldn't damage your HDD but, Tivo does a lot of self monitoring and if it decides there is a problem, it can invoke a reboot.


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## Rob Nespor Bellis (Feb 17, 2001)

benallenuk said:


> 2MB/sec extraction


I've always found the higher speeds cause problems with the TiVo, remember it also has to process the network traffic with the 50MHz processor.

I tend to put a bandwith limit of about 1400KB/s on my downloads to overcome this problem.

Rgds,

R.


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## aerialplug (Oct 20, 2000)

Heavy "other" usage of the hard drive and CPU often causes my output to freeze momentarily and occasionally for recordings to have holes in them where the timeline jumps. MOst annoying during Who Wants To Be A Millionaire a few weeks ago where the video skipped at critical moments 3 times just as the answer to a question was being given (thus I didn't know what the answer was!).


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## mike0151 (Dec 13, 2001)

I try to ensure that I only do that which may not be discussed when TiVo isn't recording, to avoid such problems. I have occasionally started Tserver while playing back a recording and it certainly mucks up the picture (and possibly the sound) until it sets to a lower priority.

Mike


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## sanderton (Jan 4, 2002)

As Rob says, an optimised to the max download can hog the system and make playback poor (or more commonly, make the menus just stop working). I too have throttled it back a bit to give the system a chance to breathe. Not noticed any recording issues.

But when fine tuned, you can record at Best, watch a Best recording and unmentionable a file at the same time with no problems.


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## benallenuk (Aug 1, 2005)

I have noticed all of the above symptons, I will keep an eye on things, maybe throttle things down.

Cheers for ur opinions!

Ben


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## iankb (Oct 9, 2000)

When I used to use double-socket mode over an AirNet connection to do unmentionable things, it used to cause a lot of disruption. Since changing to a faster cachecard connection, double-socket mode no longer causes a problem.


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