Playlist kills my server

[cmerrill77]

I have a small collection (<3000 songs) roughly organized in directories by genre, artist and album. I have a playlist with ~2500 songs that was created with Winamp in the root folder of the collection. At the time, winamp was running on my desktop while both the collection and the playlist were on a network share (windows/smb network). I moved the collection and playlist to my Fedora Core 4 server over the weekend and installed slimserver. It indexed the collection without any problems and I can browse easily by artist, album, etc.

When I try to play that playlist (via either the web interface or through softsqueeze) slimserver goes postal and hoses itself and the server - consuming all available memory and CPU. Linux eventually kills the process, but I have to restart several services (e.g. network) to get the server back into a usable state. The softsqueeze player never shows any sign of playing the list.

The server is a dual-800MHz P3 with 512M RAM. Prior to playing the playlist, the server is using a mere 204M of the 512M physical memory and none of the 512M of virtual (swap) memory. When attempting to play the playlist, it consumes 90-99% of CPU and the memory slowly climbs until it runs out of both physical and virtual memory, which takes less than a minute. The server then churns for a while and eventually recovers when the slimserver process is killed.

The server has the latest FC4 updates (as of last night) and the 2.6.12 SMP kernel. Perl 5.8.6. Winamp load and plays the playlist instantaneously. The playlist (.m3u) is only 162k.

Any ideas? Is this a problem with softsqueeze that I will not see when my squeezebox arrives? Should I create the playlist differently?

TIA,
C

[kdf]

I
On 8-Jul-05, at 6:45 AM, cmerrill77 wrote:

> playlist
> instantaneously. The playlist (.m3u) is only 162k.
>
> Any ideas? Is this a problem with softsqueeze that I will not see when
> my squeezebox arrives? Should I create the playlist differently?
>
I don't recall 'going postal' as a common error from perl.

do you think you could look in your event viewer, or try creating a
debug log for more specific info?

another way to see more of what is going on, try command line:
stop the service
open a command prompt
cd "\program files\slimserver\server\"
slim.exe --d_source --d_info

then when you try that playlist, you'll get a lot of output from the
playback and file info

-kdf

[kevin]

Does the playlist file use absolute or relative paths? Or traverse smb shares or anything odd like that?

Could you possibly gzip it and attach it?

[merrill77]

Does the playlist file use absolute or relative paths? Or traverse smb shares or anything odd like that?

From what I can see in the file, it doesn't seem to contain any absolute paths. They look to all be relative to the playlist. I assume (hope) that if the songs could not be found, I would simply get an error or they would be silently dropped form the playlist.

Could you possibly gzip it and attach it?

Sure...here it is.

[merrill77]

I found this message repeated over and over in the slimserver.log file. It appears to be the only message in the log file, but I only scanned the beginning and end of the 650M file, prior to deleting it.

utf8 "\xE1" does not map to Unicode at /usr/local/slimserver/Slim/Formats/Parse.pm line 178, <GEN7> line 379.

Does this help at all?