Ever since our Sky box got the latest firmware its been troublesome. Every 3 or 4 weeks it will lock up at random You could be trying to change channel, chase play through the adverts, nothing fancy just the usual day to day stuff.
The only fix is to unplug and reset the box. Then its absolutely fine for a few weeks again. Anyone else been having problems?
Memory leaks are a serious problem.
And they are way too common. TBH, most STBs have them, some more serious than others. These days, it is more or less unavoidable to boot your box now and then. In fact, on our previous generation (and admittedly cable) box, we implemented a night-time clean-up job that finished by rebooting the box to clear the memory! Quite a brute-force solution. But customer callls plummeted! Everyone's happy!
Many modern boxes are fairly resource-constrained (limited memory), with no virtual memory (swap-space on disk).
They also have the UI applications written i Javascript/HTML, running in a embedded browser environment. The garbage-collector routines of these browsers don't always work very well, so the browser process grows and grows...
The software stack is mostly based on Linux, with all sorts of chipset-dependent drivers and proprietary tv client software. Again, lots of potential for memory leaks, and indeed all sorts of other resource mamangement confliects (tuners, disk space etc).
Making good software is very, very expensive. Screwing up existing software is very, very easy. Would not be surprised if Sky had introduced a bug in the latest software that would lead to your head-aches....
