Ideal conditions for VDR and Vompserver

[stu-e]

What are the ideal conditions under which to run VDR with Vompserver?

For example:
VDR Nice level?
Nice level relative to other apps, daemons and stuff running at the same time?
Pre-emptive kernel?
Kernel timer 250Hz? 1000Hz?
Quantity of system memory?
Processor speed? Mobile processor frequency scaling to save power?
Should the hard disk be defragmented on a regular basis?
Can using other applications on the same machine like web browsing, interfere with VDR operation?

Is it even worth worrying about?

I am running VDR with Vompserver for the front end and I am keen to get other peoples opinions on their optimum setup.

[dingo35]

In my experience, on ranges from PIII 600Mhz to AMD Athlon 64 3500Mhz, vdr uses so little CPU (when using FF-card and not a softdevice-solution), that nice-ing has hardly effect. Even with 8 recordings software-decrypting there is still lots of idle cpu for all other services on my box (and that is a lot).

Pre-emptive kernel is my favorite, it made vdr "feel" a little more responsive, but major argument was it made the voice quality of my asterisk server (on the same box) better.
Kernel timer changing to 1000Hz gave me a lot of buffering problems with dvb-drivers, which could be solved by increasing buffer sizes.... but nothing else changed, so I changed it back to 250Hz.

I must say I am running with 1Gb RAM, so all my services are running there and swap is not used. I scale down my cpu to its lowest frequency to save power and noise.
Defragmentation is no issue on linux file systems.

Don't worry, just use your standard distribution setting and load all those apps to your server, it'll run fine.