Garbage Cleanup takes over 45 minutes to complete?

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Cavebat

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Garbage Cleanup takes over 45 minutes to complete?

#1

Post by Cavebat » Tue May 30, 2023 7:25 pm

I was wondering if Garbage Cleanup takes over 45 minutes to complete for other people? Is this indicative of another problem? Should I manually run a Garbage Cleanup through the command prompt more frequently?

Space

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#2

Post by Space » Tue May 30, 2023 11:46 pm

My last garbage cleanup took over 3 hours. The previous one was over 2.5 hours. I have it run every 5 days.

Note that I have a mechanical hard drive.

I'm not sure why it takes so long, but I have noticed that if I look at WMC's TV guide using Remote Potato, I can see entries going back for months (for shows I never recorded). You can't go backwards in time within WMC itself, but Remote Potato allows you to see previous days guide data by just pressing the left arrow button while viewing the guide. Note that Remote Potato requires you having a browser that still supports Microsoft Silverlight. I use Pale Moon solely for use with Remote Potato.

I can only guess from this that the garbage cleanup is not working (at least not completely) and the DB just keeps getting bigger, resulting in longer garbage cleanup times (I just checked the WMC DB file in C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\eHome and it is currently just over 1 gigabyte!).

I've posted this problem here in the past, but still have no solutions.

Note that there are no error messages in the Event Viewer, it just logs the start and end messages every 5 days, like everything is fine.

One thing that does work is the "[Rebuild WMC Database]" button in epg123, which essentially wipes out the entire DB and loads in just the basic Series and other settings, but this also results in losing the episode recording history for individual Series (which can be a pain for Series you have set to record "New & Rerun").

But even after starting "fresh" like this, it still takes about an hour to run garbage cleanup for me.

It's not just garbage cleanup that is slow, the daily ImportMxfFile() can sometimes take up to 20 minutes and the VerifyLoad() can take 10 minutes.

I'll probably have to do something about the 1 GB DB file size, I'm guessing that is not a good thing, so I will probably bite the bullet and rebuild the DB, although I wish I knew why the garbage cleanup wasn't working for me and seemingly does work for everyone else (at least I haven't seen any others complain or acknowledge this is happening with their system).

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garyan2

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#3

Post by garyan2 » Wed May 31, 2023 1:27 am

My garbage collection takes at most 5 minutes. I only have 35 stations, 15 days of guide listings so import and verify maybe takes a minute.

Sent from my SM-G781U1 using Tapatalk

- Gary
Keeping WMC alive beyond January 2020. https://garyan2.github.io

Space

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#4

Post by Space » Wed May 31, 2023 5:03 am

I have over 300 channels and set it to 21 days of listings, so I would expect the DB to be larger and take longer to load/GC but like I said, after a rebuild, it takes much less time than it is currently taking, which I have to attribute to the 1 gigabyte DB size. It seems to take more and more time to load as the DB gets larger and larger.


When I use the "Transfer tool" to view entries, I see a bunch of "OneTime" entries for old shows that I believe I successfully recorded in the past (it is possible that they were one-time recordings that did not record due to them being removed from the guide before air time, or for some other reason). Some of them are from recording the Olympics back in 2021. I'm not sure if these are supposed to be deleted by the garbage cleanup, but if so, they were not.

I left clicked on all of them and deleted them since I don't think they serve any purpose.

I figure the reason garbage cleanup is not working for me is either a systemic problem with my system/configuration, or a problem with data in the DB that the garbage cleanup doesn't like which causes it to silently abort some of it's cleanup.

If it is due to entries in the DB, then since I continue to have this problem even after rebuilding the database, I would assume it is something that is saved in the backup files that are loaded in to the fresh DB when a rebuild is performed.

technodevotee

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#5

Post by technodevotee » Mon Jun 05, 2023 9:57 pm

This may not be related at all to your issue but I run Recording Broker on two PCs to broker recordings between the two PCs (surprise!) and, in recent years, found that garbage collection never completed if the Recording Broker service is running.

To get round this, I created a VB script that stops the Recording Broker service when MCUpdate.exe is running and starts the recording broker service when MCUpdate.exe is not running.

I have had no issues with running GC since I've been using my script.

Space

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#6

Post by Space » Mon Jun 05, 2023 11:26 pm

technodevotee wrote: Mon Jun 05, 2023 9:57 pm This may not be related at all to your issue but I run Recording Broker on two PCs to broker recordings between the two PCs (surprise!) and, in recent years, found that garbage collection never completed if the Recording Broker service is running.
...
Interesting, the only thing I have running that accesses the WMC server processes (other than WMC itself) during the cleanup is Remote Potato... Maybe I should try stopping the Remote Potato server and running garbage cleanup to see if that fixes anything...

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