Will this speed up TiVo?
 

Do those with more technical knowledge than me about such things think that this will improve the speed of a VM TiVo box?

Re: Will this speed up TiVo?
 

No that would not in any way speed up the TiVo. Its connection is used for the apps and On Demand.

The OS and general operation of TiVo are not governed by its internet connection. Only a faster CPU or more RAM would have any actual effect on it.

AFAIK the connection to the VM router would only be used for streaming recordings from one box to another or using the VM app as a remote control.

Re: Will this speed up TiVo?
 

You are totally correct, i'm hopeing the next versions comes with a decent app store and enough RAM to make it future proof...

Also cloud stored recordings wouldn't go a miss lol

Re: Will this speed up TiVo?
 

I have slow response times to actions performed on my 1TB Tivo box.

It's about 70% full of recordings but deleting recordings or just scrolling through the options can take what seems an eternity and you get tired of just seeing the 'whirly circle' each time.

Does anyone know for definite if there are any plans to improve the speed of the Tivo in any immediate release ???

Re: Will this speed up TiVo?
 

The tivo has been out for years, if they could make it faster then it would be

Re: Will this speed up TiVo?
 

To be honest I feel my boxes were more stable and less sluggish before they moved over to the Haxe platform.

I wouldn't be surprised if what I am seeing (and I don't think I'm alone) is simply the result of the developers having to convert code from the Air platform to Haxe, without the full knowledge of how to develop the most efficient software for the latter due to inexperience in working with it.

Re: Will this speed up TiVo?
 

The slowness is mainly due to Linux paging. It has got worse over time due to the number of applications growing. Some changes are planned which may alleviate it, but it's too early to be certain.

Re: Will this speed up TiVo?
 

Paging (or more likely in this case increased swapping to and from the disk) is just a symptom not the cause.

So are you saying that the new apps are running in memory and therefore reducing the amount of physical memory available to the normal TiVO process or have these apps taken up too much space on the disk reducing the available swap space?

The first would be a sign of poorly implemented code that has a memory leak or needlessly trying to run every app at once. The latter would be utter madness on a closed architecture device.

Re: Will this speed up TiVo?
 

No, slowness is the symptom ;). Paging/swapping is the cause. (I know the terms are used interchangeably, but I was taught that swapping is copying whole processes/programs and paging is copying fixed-size pages). Anyway...

Neither. The apps themselves aren't permanently held in memory, but the software needed to support them, such as codecs and interpreters, is. This is what has grown over time. But as the apps develop, some support software may become redundant and can be removed.

Re: Will this speed up TiVo?
 

I'd just about be happy to accept this if it meant that the iPlayer and Netflix loaded quickly but they don't. As it stands, if I understand what you are saying, my box has become sluggish to allow a load of apps I never use, and because they have been developed by the summer placement in some shoddy software house, to dump their rubbish in physical memory leaving no room for my "Planned Recordings" request to be processed. Frankly, if this is the case, it is embarrassing for TiVo and VM. You've allowed some cowboys to trash your product.

Re: Will this speed up TiVo?
 

Our Tivo seems to be getting slower and slower as time passes. It's really annoying.

Re: Will this speed up TiVo?
 

Ours too, I'm getting the purple circle daily, even after reboots. Only at 22% recordings.

Re: Will this speed up TiVo?
 

Maybe it's time to scrap the apps altogether if the TiVo is becoming unacceptably slow??

http://www.cableforum.co.uk/board/11...ivo-speed.html

Re: Will this speed up TiVo?
 

Remember there are 3 million TiVo users and most of them are perfectly happy as things stand...

Re: Will this speed up TiVo?
 

I think that scrapping the apps on the Tivo would be a major mistake and a move in the wrong direction.

What we need is faster responses, not deterioration of services.

About 40% of my viewing is through various apps these days. The old method of watching TV is fast becoming outmoded, Richard.

Re: Will this speed up TiVo?
 

Has anyone used Liberty Global's Horizon set-top box? Would be interesting to hear how that compares in real use.

Re: Will this speed up TiVo?
 

l have heard from certain sources that its not that clever and full of bugs.

Re: Will this speed up TiVo?
 

Mine knocks spots of the outdated
tivo:erm:

Re: Will this speed up TiVo?
 

Well that's good for you young Sir.:)

Re: Will this speed up TiVo?
 

But the problem is that without VM replacing all the old hardware (which I doubt that they would be prepared to do), the response times aren't going to improve. In fact, if all the apps that were promised come to fruition, it may become worse!

It's easy and cheap enough to enjoy apps via alternative methods these days

That's the logic behind my suggestion. Let's hope that the work that SP mentioned will improve things.

Ohhh, that's interesting. I've heard nothing but praise for the Horizon box, but i'm certainly no expert.

What have you got Itshim?

Re: Will this speed up TiVo?
 

Having all the apps in the world wouldn't slow TiVo down as an app is only loaded and taking resource when it's running.

Re: Will this speed up TiVo?
 

If that's the case, maybe those unhappy with the speed of their TiVo should exit all apps as a way to speed it up??

Re: Will this speed up TiVo?
 

You can't run one more than one app at a time. Different parts of the TiVo interface - My Shows, Home, On Demand - are also effectively Haxe apps. The biggest performance issue is in switching between those and the time it takes to unload one and load and prepare another for use.

Re: Will this speed up TiVo?
 

Meanwhile my 2TB Sky boxs are faster than slime off a shovel. :)

Re: Will this speed up TiVo?
 

Good for you... :)

Re: Will this speed up TiVo?
 

Most people don't use the apps (apart from iPlayer). They just use it for watching and recording TV programmes. Tivo is painfully slow at times. Sky's and VMs own VHD box put it to shame. It needs a clear out of the rubbish people don't use to increase the speed on services they do use.

Re: Will this speed up TiVo?
 

I'd expect this to be the case and if so a question that remains is what's eating up the physical memory (I'm assuming Spiderplant's description of the main symptom is correct)?

There's no way the hardware spec, as "old" as it is, should be struggling as it has since the Plum update.

Re: Will this speed up TiVo?
 

With Haxe / OpenFL it's possible to bring in a lot of other libraries that will eat up physical memory but might only actually be used for one small function within an app. I assume that was Spiderplant's point about stripping out unnecessary stuff. Developers using Haxe are also mostly targeting mobile or desktop devices with much larger physical memory than the TiVo so there is less incentive for them to ensure an efficient memory footprint. Adobe Air in comparison was built to support lower-end devices.

Someone I know who evaluated Haxe for a project also said that it was not especially clean when it came to memory leaks and in a device like the TiVo where an application is running for a long time that is more of an issue than in a mobile phone app. You would expect these things to improve in time - this was a first release - though I get the impression the TiVo dev team is not especially large and time spent firefighting issues like this after a major architectural change mean less time on new features or improving the UI.

Re: Will this speed up TiVo?
 

This is pretty much what I've heard in and around the industry. For the record though Adobe Air was first touted as a platform on which to build Flex apps as desktop apps as opposed to browser based apps. But I think once that wasn't taken up it moved more into the mobile market. Also Air doesn't protect lazy/less experienced developers from pulling in rafts of dependencies and Haxe is the same. Developers need the experience working with it and the discipline to protect their target device.

We could of course be totally wrong but My initial thought on reading Spiderplant's "paging" comment was memory leak or bloated software (didn't think it would be from the apps though).

Re: Will this speed up TiVo?
 

Ahhh right, I didn't realize that; I don't actually have a TiVo.

That was my thinking to speed it up.

Surprised to learn that a mobile phone has more memory than a TiVo!

Maybe a solution could be to issue some type of hardware to provide it with more memory (in the same way that SD cards increase the storage capacity of tablets) if this is technically possible.

Re: Will this speed up TiVo?
 

Virgin boxes I think are on 3.1?

https://www.cableforum.co.uk/images/...2015/11/16.jpg

From https://github.com/TiVo/wwx2015/blob...Enterprise.pdf

Re: Will this speed up TiVo?
 

I thought I recognised the graph and i did. It's used in this article on the Haxe site: http://haxe.org/articles/tivo-and-haxe/

Both an interesting read for those in the industry (and perhaps some that aren't).