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[meehawl]

I was using Media Jukebox v399 happily with no problems. I just "upgraded" to Media Center 9.0.180. Now when I stream MP3s from my server across WAN to my PC, the server is crashing randomly. This has happened four times today. With MJ, I literally never experienced a crash despite sometimes running it for several weeks.

My system:

Server: Win2K Server SP4. Dual P3 Coppermine. MC 9.0.180. Media Server 1.0.174.0.
Client: WinXP SP1a, Dual P3 Coppermine. MC 9.0.180.

What's up? Do I need to single-CPU the Media Server process? Any ideas?

[John Gateley]

Crash of the machine or crash of the program?

j

[meehawl]

It was just the Media Server crashing and quitting. Win2K Server is pretty good about not crashing completely.

I "solved" it by using Windows task manager "Affinity" to restrict the Media Server to a single CPU. I was prompted to do this because I've seen similar periodic crashes from other streaming/p2p programs, such as Kazaa and Soulseek. They seem generally happier with a single CPU.

Anyway, now the Media Server has been up for 24+ hours streaming to several maachines, so I am becoming more confident about it again.

[JimH]

That's almost certain to be an OS issue.  We're not dealing with the # of CPU's the PC has.

[meehawl]

At the risk of replying endlessly to myself, the Media Server was humming along nicely so I decided to stress test it. I set up five five client streams -- to 3 LAN, 2 WAN hosts, and after an hour or so it crashed out.

I'm unsure of what you mean when you say "that's an OS issue". The server is a very plain, vanilla Server. Dual P3, Supermicro P6DBE, 1GB ECC PC-100, SCSI RAID 1, ATA RAID 5, Win2K Server SP4. It has no expansion beyond stock except for the RAID cards. It always stays up for weeks or months (depending on when MS issue a critical patch that requires reboot).

It has very little software beyond standrd Win2K Server install:

IIS 5
Symantec Enterprise Antivirus
Media Center 9.0.180
Windows Media Producer

So what you're saying is the Media Server is not supported on Windows Server 2000? What about Windows Server 2003? When you say "We're not dealing with the number of CPUs", what about the pseudo-multi CPU hyperthreading on newer P4s? With my configuration I seem be getting some runaway memory thread/locking issues with multi CPUs and Media Server 9.0.180.

I upgraded from Media Jukebox 8 - do you think it would help if I do a clean install, clear out any DLL cruft, and re-initialise the library?

Thanks,

Mike

[John Gateley]

At the risk of replying endlessly to myself, the Media Server was humming along nicely so I decided to stress test it. I set up five five client streams -- to 3 LAN, 2 WAN hosts, and after an hour or so it crashed out.

Sounds like I'm not restricting access to a shared object everywhere, and it is only showing up with multiple clients. I'll look at this when I get a chance.

Did your stress test include tying media server to the single cpu?

j

[meehawl]

"Did your stress test include tying media server to the single cpu"

Yes it did. Limiting it to a single CPU seems to be the only way to persuade it to run for a protracted period of time.

Great program, by the way. I work for a software company that makes distributed systems (think CORBA/J2EE, only gnarly, and for MMOGs). I know how darn difficult client-server can be and the clean implementation of MC is a marvel. Why do I hear so much noise about iTunes in the popular press and so little about MJ/MC?!?

[John Gateley]

Thanks. Did your stress test show that I have a chance of reproducing the bug here on a single CPU machine? Or does it only show up on multiple CPU machines?

j

[meehawl]

Did your stress test show that I have a chance of reproducing the bug here on a single CPU machine? Or does it only show up on multiple CPU machines

Well sadly my three main machines are all dual CPU, including the MC Server, so I can't really address this. Not the most average setup I know. But I do know that the V8 Server seemed to run with more stability on the dual CPUs. I'm sorry I can't be more help. If you want to send me a debug version I can run it and send you some crash logs.

How decoupled is the Server from the rest of the MC suite? Is there a chance of some Linux and OSX implementations? Maybe get some open-source momentum going?