Loadbalancer with local + remote, and caid:ident restrictions

Hi:

It seems to me that if you want to loadbalance local cards, then you want lb_mode=3, which sort of mimics an LRU (least recently used) algorithm (I didnt check the code in detail).

However, when you are having remote/proxy readers, you want lb_mode=1, because you always want the fastest remote card.

I've been running with lb_mode=1, and noticed that one of my local cards gets about 3x as many ECM requests as the other card, even though they are identical cards, and have pretty much the same average response time (at least according to the statistics show in the webif)

There's also warnings about not being able to use either the services or idents in the [reader] stanza when using the loadbalancer. Is this really the case ? It seems illogical to me; or is the idea that one uses the ident paramter on a per-user basis ?

How do people who have both local cards, sharing, and also remote readers handling this ? (i.e. is there a best practice ?)

Quote from Iame

I too have difficulty figuring this out but I have only one local. Why would you(I mean anybody) have 2 identical cards. Do you mean identical locals ?

Call them whatever you want -- they are 2 identical (same caid:ident) cards. I have several 5+ systems accessing these cards locally, plus some external clients. For installations that constantly scrape the EIT/EPG (mythtv, tvheadend), although they dont actually need to decrypt, still attempt to; there are certain cards (like my Conax ones), which currently return CW between 500 and 1200ms, having a bunch of requests slows things down, and causes pixelation while watching. Call it "cosmetic" if you want, but its still annoying.

I think that because of loadbalancing, you cannot set the caid:ident and/or services on the reader, but have to do it on a per user basis; but if you want to share cards with others, this becomes quickly out of control; there is no reasonable way to do that, I think, especially if cards might be multiple hops from you...

Quote from annie12

If you dont mind me asking why have you 2 identical (same caid:ident) cards.
would one not suffice/do..??

Mainly because all of my cards are connected to a bunch of readers connected to a single machine in the server rack -- I've noticed that when there are lots of requests (as there can be, because mythtv, expecially, spends all of its time grabbing EIT when not recording), CW response times can go up, leading to pixelation and/or freezing, which I want to avoid. Some cards are worse then others (my conax card is particularly bad), and I want to provide good service to my clients :-}