New Record Requests take 20++ Minutes to Add

[jfreiman]

I have no clue why this is happening all of the sudden (using WMC for 6 years+)

When I go to add a new Series Recording Request, Windows Media Center pauses for 20, 60 minutes or even several hours(!!) before it completes the request and returns control of WMC back to me. This same symptom happens now even when I record a single show, or even delete a series.

This happens on both my Xbox MCX and on my WMC machine.

I do have 12 Ceton tuners, but this has never been an issue before and it's far fewer than the 18 I used to have. :/

I have tried everything from clearing out all my recorded series request, re-installed Windows 8.1 from scratch, etc. The end result is always the same.

I tried to search for this issue in the forums, but didn't see anyone else experiencing this issue -- has anyone come across this before?

mcupdate is hogging cpu cycles during the request but it has plenty of memory and quite a bit of idle processes it could consume if it needed it.

Setup
AMD A10-7850K
Radeon R7 (APU)
Ceton InfiniTV 6ETH
Ceton InfiniTV 6PCIe (manual tuner install. Install PCIe first, then follow-up with remaining ETH tuners during WMC setup. If I don't do this, MCE defaults to recording from the ETH)
16GB RAM
250GB SSD
4TB 7200rpm WD Black for Recorded TV
4TB Green for video and data storage
10TB Storage Spaces
8TB External Seagate
6TB External WD
Windows Network using HomeGroup

All the latest drivers and updates for video, ceton, Windows, etc
Clean build - only essentials loaded
Did not restore mcBackup Scheduled Recordings (I honestly thought this WAS the issue, since it grew to over 780MB)
current mcepg3-0, mcepg3-1 folders in eHome total 92MB combined
Windows Indexing has completed and includes Media Center. Also tried rebuilding Index.

I'm hoping that I started doing something stupid and that's what's causing this issue, but I can't figure out what I've done differently or changed.

Any and all help would be appreciated.

[STC]

If it's happening on a brand new install perhaps there is something amiss with the chunk of guide data for your locale. Maybe a corrupt entry. The only way to tell would be just to ride it out for a week or two.

[IownFIVEechos]

I can tell you that I did a new install last weekend and did all updates to that point in windows and did not have that issue (although I had many other issues). So I would agree with STC that hopefully it is guide data. Why not do a new request manually for the GUIDE?

[STC]

As a test you could run set up as a different zip away from you at another MSO and see what happens.

[choliscott]

I assume when you try to schedule a show on the PC itself, you are seeing the Swirly circle?

I've seen this before & I can easily duplicate this problem. In fact, I posted a separate message in the past, but didn't get much response.

Ok a few questions for you:

1) How many show series you are trying to record
2) How many do you have set as record new only compared to new & repeat (another words whenever it comes on, not only at a certain time)
3) Out of the shows you have set to record New & repeat, how many have a bunch of episodes in the channel guide (talking over 25-30 episodes)
4) What is your default Start / Stop recording set to

When I had 12 turners assigned to my WMC, I record about 80 show series & all are set to record whenever they come on. I would say about 20 or so of the show series have over 25-30 episodes. I've noticed that I would start to see the swirly circle & a long while for a show to schedule before I saw the red dots. When I switch the default recording to start & stop on time, it did cut down on the amount of time that it took to schedule, but it still took a while.

What I ultimately found out that solved the issue for me, was lowering the amount of tuners assigned. I have the Ceton 6 Tuner PCI & an HD HR Prime & I noticed that it took me about 1/2 to schedule all shows series with just 6 tuners, compared to a lot longer when I added more tuners.

You might not schedule your series the same way I did, but one thing to try is maybe lowering your number of tuners down & see if you get the same result or if they schedule faster. For example, when I owned 2 Ceton 4 tuner PCI, I didn't have too many issues with 8 tuners, Not sure (for me at least) why the less number of tuners makes it schedule the shows faster

[jfreiman]

Yes, this is exactly what is happening -- swirling circle for hours (literally)

To answer your questions,

1. how many series?: I never really paid attention to this until this problem came up. My mcBackup has about nearly 200, but my new clean builds have only 10 before the problem crops up.
2-3. Record new vs repeat: The way syndication is, a few of the shows actually have tons of record entries and I was thinking about this as well. At this point I don't care about building my collection of series -- I just want my "tv" back! :/
3. Default start, stop times are 1 minute before and 2 min after.

I am "happy" to hear that you have the same experience and that you too were led to the repeat episodes eating up a chunk of resources, etc. I had a terrible problem with the BitTorrent Sync 2.0 software and it literally wiped out 100% of all my (converted) series and movies within a matter of 90 seconds. I had a full backup of my movie collection, but not my TV series. Since that time, I have been trying to rebuild my series collection by recording every episode that airs of a few shows; Blue Bloods, Criminal Minds, etc. -- several of which air on multiple channels, multiple times a day.

Also, for those who pointed to the guide data, that is something I didn't consider, but I have an identical MCE sitting next to my main MCE and it doesn't have the issue -- but it also is only recording a handful of shows.

Since I believe that Choliscott is on to something, I will double my efforts and remove as many of the syndicated recordings as possible from my schedule and see what happens. I have tried to do this already, but it seemed pointless because it happened with my mcBackup as well as my new builds (yes, plural), but even my new builds quickly became non-responsive -- likely because of the repeats.

It takes about 2 or more hours to delete or edit any entry now a series recording from both the new build or the builds with mcBackup schedules once the problem starts. Since there are a lot of backed up scheduled shows not currently airing and I can't add back into a new lineup, I'll go back to an even earlier mcBackup and build up from there.

Overnight and into today, I had my computers running full virus/malware checks and they were both clean.

I can hopefully get this cleared up today and I'll post back as soon as I see the results, but I'm betting that the problem is with the syndicated shows.

[choliscott]

I will say that based on the series scheduling I mentioned earlier, that "backup" WMC software caused me issues when trying to restore show series recordings. My backup ended up being a spreadsheet with the shows I record. Yes it's a pain to manually rescheduling, but it seems to be the only way I found that works

[jfreiman]

Thank you everyone for your input and suggestions. It turns out there were 2 problems. One was the over use of customized recording shedules for certain shows, and that slowed everything down some.

But the real culprit was that my mcBackup had got corrupted somehow and WMC didn't know how to deal with the error(s) it introduced.

After a little over a week of going MAD, I am back to my stable Media Center system.