Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[JustinChase]

So, I'm watching a movie, and after a few minutes, video starts to stutter, then gets long pauses in playback, sometimes with video continuing without audio, sometimes everything just freezes.  If I hit the left arrow to go back a few seconds, it usually starts playing fine again, but not always, but even if it does, it usually starts freezing up again right away.

I just looked at task manager, and there are 4 JRiver web applications running and 1 Media Center service running.

I have long suspected that this issue is related to MC doing auto import in the background, and I suspect the 4 web processes confirms that MC is spending all it's energy updating my library, including audio analysis in the background, and is not leaving enough juice to do the one thing I want it to be doing at this time.

While just sitting there after the latest video failed, and while I'm typing this, I checked task manager, and MC is currently using CPU, Memory and Network resources, which tells me it's doing something in the background.  In fact, I just saw the display of video cover art move, meaning it just added a video to the library.

I just looked at the log file, and it looks like MC is analyzing files right now.  The weirdest thing to me is that the files it's currently analyzing have been in my library for a LONG, LONG time, and have been analyzed many times in the past, so I can't imagine why they are being analyzed again now.

However, this analysis should NOT cause issues with media playback, IMO.

Please let me know if I can provide any more information to help resolve this issue.

Also, I'm just assuming it's auto import that is causing my issues, it could certainly be something entirely different.

Thank you!

[jmone]

Hi Justin, is it worth turning off Auto Import just to test to see if that is the issue?

[JimH]

You had another strange problem:
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=89188.msg612911#msg612911

Maybe they are related?

[JustinChase]

Hi Justin, is it worth turning off Auto Import just to test to see if that is the issue?

Yeah, I've turned it off now, and continued to have an issue with video 'pausing' every couple of seconds, but never stopped, and never lost audio.

I kept trying to figure out what might be causing this, and realized that unRAID (my server) had to be hard booted earlier in the day, and this causes it to do a parity check upon restarting.  I checked, and yes it was doing a parity check, which is VERY disc intensive.  i stopped the check, and the little pauses stopped.

I just turned auto-import back on again, and will report back if/when the glitchy playback happens again.

You had another strange problem:
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=89188.msg612911#msg612911

Maybe they are related?

No, that other issue was a result of the design of Media Center, and how the auto-import rules get applied, which was simply unclear to me at the time.  Now I understand that the behavior I was seeing was 'intentional', however confusing. 

[jmone]

It sounds like MC is trying to pull the file for playback and that the pauses, skips and hangs are when the server can not keep serving the content.  The other way to test if it is the server/nw is to copy a problematic file to the Cleint's HDD and see if it plays well from there.

As an aside, while I personally like pooling... I dislike RAID for media server (as I fond them hard to expand, were mostly running in a degraded state and added complexity).

[fitbrit]

It sounds like MC is trying to pull the file for playback and that the pauses, skips and hangs are when the server can not keep serving the content.  The other way to test if it is the server/nw is to copy a problematic file to the Cleint's HDD and see if it plays well from there.

As an aside, while I personally like pooling... I dislike RAID for media server (as I fond them hard to expand, were mostly running in a degraded state and added complexity).

unRaid is not like that.
Expand pretty much as you like, as there is no striping.

[fitbrit]

I kept trying to figure out what might be causing this, and realized that unRAID (my server) had to be hard booted earlier in the day, and this causes it to do a parity check upon restarting.  I checked, and yes it was doing a parity check, which is VERY disc intensive.  i stopped the check, and the little pauses stopped.

Parity checks can do that, as can rebuilding data.

[JustinChase]

So far, no more issues, but it's only been a short time.  I'm not sure how often auto import runs, but no more skips/delays for about 1/2 hour.

Yes, unRAID is great at allowing the array to expand with whatever discs you have laying around, or whatever you can find on sale.  I have 12 hard drives of all sizes happily installed giving me a total of 25TB usable space, with an additional 4TB parity drive.

[jmone]

unRaid is not like that.

Of course (brain fade!)

[Hendrik]

Auto Import is designed to run very low priority in the background, however I can imagine if your RAID was doing a parity check, the combination of check, auto import and playback is just way too much - not on your MC system, but on the IO from the RAID.
I can barely play files (without import running additionally) during a check on my RAID.

[JustinChase]

Yeah, it seems that was the cause of the issues.  Since stopping the parity check, and turning auto import back on, playback has been fine.  Family watched a couple of movies last night, and I got no complaints, so it seems all is well again.

I'm still not sure why MC was analyzing files that have been in my library for a LONG time, but that's another issue for another time

[glynor]

Auto-Import is unlikely to cause performance problems unless you add a whole bunch of new files to a watched directory while you are playing something back from the same disk (and even then, usually only if you have Build Thumbnails or Analyze Audio enabled in Auto-Import's settings).

Auto-Import does not just dumbly scan your directories every 10 minutes or whatever.  Learn more:
http://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Auto-Import#Background_Scanning

[JustinChase]

Yes, but as I said, MC was analyzing lots of files that were already in my library, so it's hard to know how many files it was analyzing, so it seems safe to assume that it was importing "a whole bunch of new files" while I was playing.  Additionally, I also noted that I have it set to analyze audio as part of importation, which would obviously increase the load on the machine/server, as you noted.

With all that said, it seems I've discovered the cause of these issues, and have resolved it.  (it was my server doing a parity check on the server).

Thanks again for all the help everyone.