delay mythwelcome/frontend startup

[loonylion]

I've finally got the hardware and time to build my myth box. After spending ages trying to cut the boot time and standby power use (EuP2013 setting in BIOS does nothing) I can finally boot in 26 seconds (half of which is BIOS and post) but mythbackend takes so long to start (over a minute) that mythwelcome/mythfrontend just give up waiting if set to start on xfce startup. All my attempts to delay startup of mythwelcome result in it not starting at all. Any suggestions how to either delay mythwelcome or preferably speed up mythbackend?

OS is MX Linux 17 (Debian without systemd)
DVB-T2 setup with a TBS quad tuner.

I tested recording today, it's working well

[MikeB2013]

I am assuming mythtv version 29.

To speed up mythbackend (assuming you accepted some defaults when creating Capture Cards) you could try unticking the "Open DVB Card on demand" for each Capture Card. I found with it ticked mythbackend takes longer to start up.

i don't use mythwelcome, i just auto start mythfrontend (xfce startup) it waits a while showing "Attempting to connect to master backend" for mythbackend to startup. My mythbackend has a Quad DVB-T/T2 (Hauppauge) card and a dual DVB-S/S2 (TBS 6981) tuner, with Max Recordings set to 10 for each Input Connection (I rarely have more than 3 or 4 simultaneous recordings), so there are 60 "tuners". I am using Xubuntu 18.04 so it has systemd!

Mike

[loonylion]

yes it's mythtv 29. I get the attempting to connect screen, but it times out before the backend is ready, and if you immediately retry it will time out again. I will try the open tuners on demand suggestion I have 5 recordings per tuner so only 20 total.

[fraserspur]

If the frontend is starting before the backend is ready you might try configuring the backend systemd configuration to wait for the network and tuner cards to initialise before starting, I don't know about mythwelcome but mythfrontend needs the network to be up before it will start.

Have a look at https://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Systemd_myt ... figuration

First you need to determine the device names of your tuners, look in /dev/ for them, mine are at \dev\dvb\adapter(n) where (n) is 0, 1 or 2.

The you need to edit the mythtv-backend.service file:

Code: Select all

sudo systemctl edit mythtv-backend.service

With my system I needed to add the following to overcome a similar problem to yours:
Wants=NetworkManager-wait-online.service
After=NetworkManager-wait-online.service

Wants=dev-dvb-adapter0-frontend0.device
After=dev-dvb-adapter0-frontend0.device
Wants=dev-dvb-adapter1-frontend0.device
After=dev-dvb-adapter1-frontend0.device

[MikeB2013]

yes it's mythtv 29. I get the attempting to connect screen, but it times out before the backend is ready, and if you immediately retry it will time out again. I will try the open tuners on demand suggestion I have 5 recordings per tuner so only 20 total.

There was an old problem with Retry not working if database connection timed out. This was fixed on Nov 3, 2017.

What is your mythtv version, running mythbackend --version in a terminal session will give full details.

Mike

[loonylion]

version is 29.1-20-gccbded85c9. The suggestion of unchecking the open tuners on demand option appears to have largely solved the problem.

frserspur: I don't follow, if the issue is the backend not being ready when the frontend starts, how is delaying startup of the backend going to help? It still takes x time to be ready.

[MikeB2013]

version is 29.1-20-gccbded85c9 is from May 16, 2018, there is, as of writing, only one change after this, which is May 29, 2018.

Mike