Xbian still my favourite RPi OS

[Styler]

Hi guys

This weekend my XBian 1.0 Alpha5 system died (partially). :/ I was able to use XBMC and watch videos etc, but I could not SSH, print, access network shares or access transmission/NZBGET/SICKBEARD through their web interfaces. I tried rebooting, but that didn't help. I'm not sure what happened, but I suspect it had something to do with the number of torrent files that were active at the same time (maybe 10 - 15 torrents downloading/seeding?). It was the first time I had that many going at once. The RPi was set to the default XBian overclock settings.

Anyway, I thought I would see what the other OS options were like...

OpenElec was a no straight away as it can not be set up as a print server.

With Raspbmc, I had DPKG errors during the installation of CUPS and it would freeze on the last frame of a Youtube vid for around 10s before going back to the XBMC menu. Irritating.

I ended up coming back to XBian. I had no problems with any of the items on my install check list. The NZBGET/Transmission/Sickbeard etc download packages are awesome! They make my life much easier. Everything is working again! I plan on making a backup image of my SD card once I get home this evening so that I will be more prepared for the next time my RPi gives problems. I already have a list of steps and commands necessary to repeat my install.

Thank you to everyone that has contributed to XBian. I have really enjoyed working and playing with it. Keep up the great work!

[rikardo1979]

glad to hear and thanks for feedback and support

[zilexa]

I have limited the number of downloads to 2 and uploads to 1. And set down/up limits of 400/50 KB/s. This way I can still use XBMC while Transmission is downloading, but its slow, not a problem cos playback is fine (only tested with SD content so far). My USB harddrive is NTFS. But since I am going to download to EXT4 soon I suppose down/up limits can be raised and it should still work.

So I would recommend to limit Transmission a bit so it won't choke the I/O interface and you'll be able to SSH.
Also a good idea is to limit the seeding ratio. Since Transmission has no way to set when you actually want to stop torrents completely (uTorrent is much more evolved in this featureset), your only way to automatically stop torrents from eating your upload limit is to set a low ratio.

Otherwise you will have a lot of seeding torrents which will choke it up again (unless you clean the queue manually regularly).

[Styler]

(15th Apr, 2013 10:12 PM)zilexa Wrote:  I have limited the number of downloads to 2 and uploads to 1. And set down/up limits of 400/50 KB/s. This way I can still use XBMC while Transmission is downloading, but its slow, not a problem cos playback is fine (only tested with SD content so far). My USB harddrive is NTFS. But since I am going to download to EXT4 soon I suppose down/up limits can be raised and it should still work.

So I would recommend to limit Transmission a bit so it won't choke the I/O interface and you'll be able to SSH.
Also a good idea is to limit the seeding ratio. Since Transmission has no way to set when you actually want to stop torrents completely (uTorrent is much more evolved in this featureset), your only way to automatically stop torrents from eating your upload limit is to set a low ratio.

Otherwise you will have a lot of seeding torrents which will choke it up again (unless you clean the queue manually regularly).

Thanks for the tip. I think you may right. I had quite a lot of files queued, but only 4/5 files download at the same time. I didn't have any limit for the seeding, so as more downloads finished, more files were being seeded until... the RPi lost its mind. However, if the I/O interface was clogged, then surely that would have prevented me from watching videos from my NTFS-formatted external drive? Anyway, I still plan on implementing your suggestion as I'm sure it will help. Thanks!

[zilexa]

If you download using Transmission, you might be interested in using Flexget to automatically download your tv shows by scanning rss feeds every 3 or so hours. I will start working on an additional package for Xbian but untill then:
http://forum.xbian.org/thread-634.html

XBian is definitely the best!

[guest732]

This distro is like rocket fuel for my pi Love it! Thanks

[Styler]

(15th Apr, 2013 11:34 PM)zilexa Wrote:  If you download using Transmission, you might be interested in using Flexget to automatically download your tv shows by scanning rss feeds every 3 or so hours. I will start working on an additional package for Xbian but untill then:
http://forum.xbian.org/thread-634.html

XBian is definitely the best!

Thanks. Flexget looks interesting... How does it compare to Sickbeard? I find Sickbeard good, but it seems to be quite CPU heavy. Can it find missed episodes and scan NZB rss feeds?

[zilexa]

Im sure it can but its is mainly popular because it works perfectly for all torrents rss feeds and is very powerful and robuust, it can work with any feed or just any website even. No limitations. It runs every 3 hours, never bothered me.
I dont have access to newsgroups so I do everything via torrents. Its easy, doesnt take much resources and its even user friendly.

[mk01]

if you guys are running such intensive concurrent apps, you can play with niceness.

renice -15 -p $(pgrep xbmc.bin)

will set the niceness for xbmc.bin processes. default niceness for processes is 0. you can change from -20 to 20.

THE LESS NUMBER THE HIGHER prio.

system processes and threads use to have -20, so don't go there, but feel free to use -15 to 20.

I would put transmission definitely above 10 and xbmc around -15 to -7 (at minimum).
this is to experiment for everybody, everyone is running different processes, or clocking.