Time shift setting recommendations

Lisa White

Hey guys, I need some advice on the timeshift settings. I am having problems with constant buffering and its not my internet speed or computer. I have tvheadend installed on Ubuntu 18.04 OS with 16g memory with a 2g hard drive. My system is only dedicated to tvheadend. I did a complete reinstall and setup of tvheadend and recently have been experiencing severe buffering. I tried piping the m3u playlist and problem still exists with Kodi. After researching the problem, I found that a lot of people were experiencing this issue with 4.3 version and it was related to timeshift. I turned off timeshift and problem solved with buffering. I turned it back on and the buffering instantly returned. I changed the settings to unlimited and the buffering stopped, but the manual cautions to potentially storage to grow unbound.

What settings are recommended?. Like I have stated, I have 2g of hard drive space, but my interpretation of the manual is that it could fill up the hard drive space quickly.

Thoughts?

Hiro Protagonist

Lisa White wrote:

>Like I have stated, I have 2g of hard drive space, but my interpretation of the manual is that it could fill up the hard drive space quickly.

2G is tiny, maybe you mean 2Tb?

Don't use timeshift myself, but I would interpret the manual differently. It should only use drive space if you're pausing live TV. I guess you could run into problems if you paused & then went to bed, but it should only use up space at the same rate as if you were recording.

Lisa White

Ok thanks for the info. I will leave those settings and monitor the performance.

Lisa

Ron L

I'm not sure if Time shift was ever sorted out 100%. The best performance should be using RAM only. You can choose on-demand mode where it only starts recording when you hit pause or let it go always. The later will allow you to rewind to a point prior to where you hit pause. Having it go constantly while using hard drive makes me wonder about the amount of wear and tear on the drive.

We were trying to debug this while Adam was still working on TVH and at that time never really got all the issues sorted. Not sure if any more has been done on it since then. What I tend to do is just hit the record button when I need to pause TV.

I just enabled it with RAM only 1000MB on-demand and fit to ram. Seems to be working fine.

Poul Kalff

Wouldn't it make sense to mount a drive on RAM:

tmpfs /mnt/ramhdd tmpfs nodev,nosuid,noexec,nodiratime,size=2048M 0 0

Don't know if it is possible to point hts to use it, but in this way, you could control usage.
If you set hts to use RAM and just leave a timeshift recording, it would use up all RAM eventually, correct?

Ron L

The way we used to do was just write to /run/shm. Now there are options for RAM including an option to set maximum RAM usage. Creating a new mount point isn't necessary unless there is a bug that doesn't respect the limit. Have not tested.

If you select unlimited time or size it may very well be possible to record until you run out of space.