CPU Usage on E4200 (Toastman's Tomato)

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Aqualung
Aqualung's picture
CPU Usage on E4200 (Toastman's Tomato)

I just happened to notice a worrisome fact: a few days ago I had the CPU usage at 1%, 2%, ... 10% tops on my Toastman Tomato E4200 (1.28.0493 MIPSR2-Toastman-RT-N K26 USB Ext). Interestingly, all day today it's been up at no less than 99%! What might be going on? I am not aware of any processes that might be that taxing on my E4200's resources! Anyone else can tell me what their E4200 reports? I see the ps command doesn't show CPU%, so there may be another way of pinpointing the process that's been hogging the CPU. Doesn't seem to be indexing anything on the USB-attached HDD--or, at least, it doesn't report any current indexing activity...

Brandon C
Brandon C's picture
Don't know what may be

Don't know what may be causing an issue but you could try the 'top' command and see what it says.
http://linux.about.com/od/commands/l/blcmdl1_top.htm

Aqualung
Aqualung's picture
Excellent, thank you. At any

Excellent, thank you. At any rate, I figured out that the CPU winds down after roughly 24hrs. after a router restart, so it seems that the high CPU load has something to do with the media server scanning of the HDD (it used to be set up to scan media at startup) even though the "Scan in progress" (or whatever) banner has long disappeared(!). Anyway, I have completely disabled media scanning, and now CPU load rarely goes beyond 20%. The question is now, what role does media scanning have? Why would anyone do media scanning? I imagine that this is something required by the media server in order to index the media files, is that so? So what dangers can stem from not performing periodic media scanning? Is it that (a) by not doing media scanning the media server does not index newly-added media files, or (b) media scanning is mandatory at media server startup, otherwise there will be no media index, and the media server won't work?

Toastman
Toastman's picture
| I know I won't be popular

| I know I won't be popular for saying this, but here goes anyway. Don't forget that development of the printed specification on the router's cardboard box often outstrips the actual ability of the hardware inside it :-)

These routers are pretty good at routing at normal speeds. They begin to fail at high speeds approaching 100Mbps. And they can often stand in, in place of a proper fileserver, if your expectations aren't too high and you will accept poor performance. But they can't do both at the same time and still deliver good routing performance. The hardware is simply not suited for this application.  

I always recall the old idiom - "You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear". Hope this helps.