High Memory Usage?

marvin-miller

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#21

Post by marvin-miller » Thu Dec 08, 2016 1:48 am

I've had it on both the C drive and also on the dedicated eHome/index drive. It seems to work better on the C drive as the index/ehome drive also does post-recording processing.

After monitoring disk activity in real-time for a few days I came to a new understanding of what appears to be happening.

wmplayer.exe keeps looking at the Series drive all on it's own. It scans through that drive and the contents on regular intervals. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to it. It will go in and index a series that I have not accessed for more then a week. So nothing has changed in that folder. Yet it seems to just revisit all folders regularly, regardless of changes, resulting in increased disk usage.

It appears that it is building an index, and, when done, it keeps the index in memory. At least, that's the conclusion from what I'm seeing. This is not the Windows Search service which was disabled at the time. I've come to the conclusion that the Windows Search service only indexes the Program Guide so that you can do keyword searches etc. That's it.

I'm thinking that this is more/less 'normal' with the idea that the volume of recordings has grown to the extent that the system just needs more memory and faster disks (hardware upgrades). I think I'm going to go something like this;

SSD for Boot (C Drive)
SSD for eHome directory shared with Windows Search dB
SSD for RecordedTV and Processing?
16 GB memory

Something like that.

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Crash2009

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#22

Post by Crash2009 » Thu Dec 08, 2016 2:29 am

Do you need wmplayer.exe? Try disable the service.

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#23

Post by marvin-miller » Thu Dec 08, 2016 2:31 am

You can't - it's tied into or the main part of Media Center?

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Crash2009

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#24

Post by Crash2009 » Thu Dec 08, 2016 3:21 am

marvin-miller wrote:You can't - it's tied into or the main part of Media Center?
I dont think you need it.

You can also turn it off in Windows Features.

One other thing is you can configure WMP to do "Nothing"

I'm pretty sure WMC will run without it.

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Crash2009

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#25

Post by Crash2009 » Thu Dec 08, 2016 3:26 am

One other thing you could try is to stop sharing the series drive, take a few episodes out of their folders, let WMC do the organizing, and try your Diagnostic software to see if WMP still has memory trouble after the episodes are out of the folder.

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Crash2009

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#26

Post by Crash2009 » Thu Dec 08, 2016 4:36 am

Crash2009 wrote:One other thing you could try is to stop sharing the series drive, take a few episodes out of their folders, let WMC do the organizing, and try your Diagnostic software to see if WMP still has memory trouble after the episodes are out of the folder.
Should run better after you place all the episodes of all the series into one folder named D:\RecordedTV, and set your Recorder Location to same.

Movies are the only WTV's that need a folder for each recording.

Just ran into a nice looking converter. http://www.thegreenbutton.tv/forums/vie ... 91#p112991

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#27

Post by marvin-miller » Thu Dec 08, 2016 5:04 am

Crash2009 wrote:
marvin-miller wrote:You can't - it's tied into or the main part of Media Center?
I dont think you need it.

You can also turn it off in Windows Features.

One other thing is you can configure WMP to do "Nothing"

I'm pretty sure WMC will run without it.
It was worth a try but when I went to disable it a message popped up saying that disabling Windows Media Player would also disable Windows Media Center - so the two actually are dependant on each other :( But, it was a good idea!

I can't/don't really want to alter the Movies/Series layout if at all possible. A big part of the reason for that is because I just consolidated everything down to two 8TB drives last year. Up until that point there was 8 drives of various sizes in the system and it was becoming a management hassle.

On the flip side, going all SSD except for Series & Movies will also save a lot of money on power costs over the upcoming years along with a reduction in heat generation. I'm certain that just with SSD's alone it will be much faster then it's ever been before and going from 8 to 16GB alone would probably fix it (unless it really is a memory leak).

I wouldn't be surprised if I can pick up 2 or 3 SSD's on Boxing day for a pretty good price :D

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Crash2009

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#28

Post by Crash2009 » Thu Dec 08, 2016 5:12 am

Just as a test....Move all the episodes of one series to the RecordedTV folder, and remove the series drive from the Library.

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#29

Post by marvin-miller » Thu Dec 08, 2016 5:36 am

Crash2009 wrote:Just as a test....Move all the episodes of one series to the RecordedTV folder, and remove the series drive from the Library.
I tried something similar to that earlier because I was thinking along the same lines. What I did was remove both the Series and Movie drives from the Media Center library (so it had nothing in it at all). I then re-started the computer and tested it out and I still saw the same thing - wmplayer.exe was going into both of them periodically and 'indexing' them.

Thinking about it now, I know that there is a link between Windows Media Player and Windows Media Center when it comes to libraries. If I go into Media Player and add in libraries they always show up in Media Center and vice versa. This does make me wonder, when I removed both from Media Center, if they reciprocally removed them from Media Player.

I ordered up a water cooler this afternoon as the CPU is readily over-clockable. It's a Xeon x3470 (2.9 Ghz) and I recall that it could hit 4.5 Ghz pretty easy back when I got it but the temperatures from the stock Intel air cooler made it unreliable. It will be here Friday and I can start with overclocking the memory and the ram as both are made for it. I had it running at 4Ghz for a while yesterday with a really healthy memory over clock and it was wayyyyy faster. That alone made Media Center much more fun :clap:

I wish Microsoft had made a White Paper on how Media Center works. I've worked with all of their Enterprise software over the years and was always able to find docs or KR articles explaining how things worked. I've yet to come across anything that really explained how Media Center worked.

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Crash2009

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#30

Post by Crash2009 » Tue Dec 13, 2016 3:20 am

You can also remove them from WMP

Top left corner....Organize/manage libraries/ recorded tv

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#31

Post by marvin-miller » Tue Dec 13, 2016 3:23 am

Crash2009 wrote:You can also remove them from WMP

Top left corner....Organize/manage libraries/ recorded tv
They're linked so when you remove them from Windows Media Player they are also removed from Windows Media Center.

My water cooler showed up the other day and once installed I spent a day over-clocking the system. I managed to go from 2.93 Ghz to 4.02 Ghz and brought the memory from 1333 to +1800 :D In the end, it worked out very well and the system is considerably faster. I'm hoping on Boxing day I'll be able to score 2 or 3 SSD's and complete the upgrade.

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#32

Post by DavidinCT » Mon Dec 19, 2016 6:44 pm

Crash2009 wrote:
marvin-miller wrote:You can't - it's tied into or the main part of Media Center?
I dont think you need it.

You can also turn it off in Windows Features.

One other thing is you can configure WMP to do "Nothing"

I'm pretty sure WMC will run without it.
WMC depends on Media Player for DRM and libraries... If you remove it WMC will not run. Even more DRM'ed based content wont work with out it.

On a 7/8 machine when you have music or movies setup in WMC, open Media Player and look over your libraries and you will everything listed there. Normally if your having issues with WMC libraries WMP is where to fix them...

That was the biggest thing on Windows 10 with the Annversery version.... as Microsoft removed DRM from WMP and updated it for a new version with no backwards compatabilty. This is why that upgrade killed DRM and some tuners... I thought this was known...
-Dave
Twitter @TheCoolDave

Windows Media Center certified and WMC MVP 2010 - 2012

marvin-miller

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#33

Post by marvin-miller » Mon Dec 19, 2016 6:59 pm

I use a HDMI splitter that removes HDCP so there's no need for DRM :)

I think we mentioned earlier that Windows Media Player is required for WMC :mrgreen:

As for Windows 10 - because I use Media Center it's not worth it (among other reasons). As with all Microsoft O/S upgrades since Windows 2000, I'll be the last one standing :lol:

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#34

Post by marvin-miller » Sat Apr 22, 2017 9:17 pm

Just an update on this issue in case anyone is watching it or runs into it in the future.

I did a 'phased' update so I could experience the results one by one. Upgrading the memory from 8GB to 16GB made a considerable difference. When going into the Movies folder the system quickly used up +90% of the memory (the 16GB) but it used it up for only a very short period of time.

So with the 8GB of memory, going into the Movies folder would trigger an update. The system would starve for memory and start paging on the C drive. Once this cycle started, the system would slug down to the point where the system was largely un-usable. This could take 30 minutes - or more depending on wether Media Center re-indexed the entire drive or not,

With 16GB of memory typically the duration of the indexing decreased dramatically. The system quickly ramps up to 16GB and then finishes the indexing operation very quickly. Typically within a few minutes!

So memory was a really, really big deal. Expanding to 16GB allowed most of the indexing to run directly from memory. I also increased the memory speed to 2100Mhz from 1800?

I then installed an SSD that is doing 250 MB writes and 400 MB reads. I moved the ehome directory over to the SSD and noticed an inmmediate increase in the speed that the guide displays. Also future recordings etc. Basically anything that uses the dB in Media Center is much faster. This was expected. At present, I've also moved the Indexing over to that drive as well as commercial removal and post recording processing.

I am planning on splitting up these operations on multiple SSD's later.

All told, adding memory did a LOT to improve the situation. It made the most difference by far. I'm likely going to go to 32GB of installed memory in short order. I suspect this will fix pretty much everything as it seems 16GB is just a little to small. 32 would probably give me a lot of overhead.

For percieved speed, anything that loads the guide dB, run it off an SSD and you'll see a good difference in speed. My problem is that I need to spend a fair bit on this old rig to get everything right. My two 8TB drives are full so ideally I need some more of those (24TB anyway) and more memory and more SSD's......

Probably the smartest move would be to pick up a proper RAID controller (3ware 8 port) and then make a single SSD-based RAID 5 array for everything other then program storage. This would probably be the easiest way to go.

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