You may periodically experience one or more of the systems pounding the heck out of your network for no apparent reason. For example, its five o'clock in the morning and nobody is watching anything, nor are there any recordings in progress and all of the recordings from the previous day have been commercial flagged. In other words, to paraphrase Mr. R., it should be a quiet day in the neighborhood. But, something is pounding the heck out of the network switch.
Install the program nethogs like this:
su
apt-get install nethogs
When you run it, it will show you which process generating all of the network traffic. Generally, we find that it is the backend. On later versions of Myth, you can simply kill it and it will restart automagically. This may solve the problem.
Unfortunately, in our experience, the most common reason for the network being pounded by the backend process is related to the Hauppauge HVR-2250 capture card. Something in the code for this device causes its two encoders to head south and stop working while, at the same time, causing the backend process to pound the heck out of the NIC. Killing the backend process does get rid of the network traffic temporarily. But, as soon as something tries to use one of the encoders on the HVR-2250, the pounding starts right up again. And, neither of the two encoders works. So, the only solution appears to be a reboot.