Navaho Gunleg

Something tells me I need some more memory in my MythTV machine — it was happily transcoding earlier recorded programmes when suddenly all queued transcoding jobs seemed to fail. Checking the backend’s logfile I noticed a lot of these errors:

myth_system(): Error, fork() failed because Cannot allocate memory

There’s 512MB in it at the moment — and to serve as the backend (with 2 encoder cards), the frontend, and the box being its own database-server it works just fine. It can handle one additional transcoding job on top of that too — but the moment it wants to do the next one they all fail due to not having enough memory. Putting into the equation that it is also the print-server I guess it simply runs too much services for the installed amount of memory. And, error messages usually don’t lie.

Having said that, I also remember the out-of-memory-killer yapping in my log-file about killing Firefox some weeks ago, but I assumed that it was ‘just’ firefox eating up resources. So, for fun I did a full system reboot to find out that, if the system’s completely loaded, there’s about 4 MB free memory. Indeed — not an awful lot. I also noticed swap space is about 4% free (in the beginning it didn’t even touch swap space!).

So, there’s no doubt: ‘not enough memory‘ is the problem and I have to get some more.

My own memory not serving me well either, thanks to the utility dmidecode I was able to figure out whether I had bought 2 x 256MB or just 1 x 512MB DIMM at the time, without having to open up the case just yet — which really is a serious hassle. (There’s no avoiding that job when I have to install the modules though.)

I’ll be doing that later today, after I’ve bought a new memory module and before any new programmes are scheduled to record…