Re-Buffering

[robertyoungjohns]

I'm running Squeezebox 7.4.1 server on a dedicated PC with Windows 7 and 4GB RAM. I have four players - all of which are hardwired to my network and on the same hub as the server. Until the last few days, it worked just fine but has suddenly starting suffering constant re-buffering problems which makes it unuseable.

Music is all lossless WMV. I've run network monitoring tools and the network appears in good health and seems to have plenty of capacity. I'm baffled and would appreciate any thoughts on how to do further problem determination.

[MeSue]

Any third-party plug-ins installed?

[robertyoungjohns]

No plugins. In fact the most frustrating thing is that I can't think of any change that coincides with the onset of this problem.

[bpa]

What is CPU load like since WMA lossless will have to be decoded and then re-encoded into Flac. If the processor is single core and 4 players are running - you might have problems.

[robertyoungjohns]

Quad core @ 3GHz. With all 4 players streaming, CPU load is rarely higher than 5%. Network bandwidth use is 1.6% per player. Network will run at 12 MB/s for file transfer between this machine and my backup storage so I really don't think network bandwidth is the issue.

Fuunt thing is that today the system is working just fine. Don't you hate problems which come and go like this!

[jdh500]

I've had exactly the same issue as you, via a all wired giga-bit network, had the rebuffering issue but with FLAC files over the weekend but tonight the problem seems to have gone away !!!

JDH.

Quad core @ 3GHz. With all 4 players streaming, CPU load is rarely higher than 5%. Network bandwidth use is 1.6% per player. Network will run at 12 MB/s for file transfer between this machine and my backup storage so I really don't think network bandwidth is the issue.

Fuunt thing is that today the system is working just fine. Don't you hate problems which come and go like this!

[bpa]

Quad core @ 3GHz. With all 4 players streaming, CPU load is rarely higher than 5%.

I don't think CPU is the root cause but with multicore systems - you should looks at the load on each core as SBS will only run on one core so if SBS CPU was running at 100% - overall CPU load on your system will be 25%. Transcoding and scanner will be run in a different cores where possible so a load of 5% does indicate generally no problems but a transcode process of a file on a fast system will take a v. short time - so CPU spikes may be of interest not just long term load average.

You should think in terms of what could block/slow SBS running - typically
* Disk activity such as to/from a networked drive, use of "slow" disks (e.g. flash), file/directory sharing with possibility of lockouts at directory level.
* Plugins which do not do async network requests.
* security settings which could slow the start/stopping of transcoding activities.
* any process which could slow or prevent access to disks or registry such as security, virus scans.

You could run Process Explorer ( http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/s.../bb896653.aspx ) and where you have a "stutter" look back at the graphs and seen if anything unusual (e.g. mem spike, disk spike, cpu spike) can be seen or what other apps are running at the time.

[DigitalMitch]

I've seen rebuffering as a result of other activities on my server, namely:-

adding new file (running EAC direct to server)
retagging with MP3Tag (running on p.c. but writing direct to server)
MusicIP validating new songs
AlbumCatalogCreator v2 creating the album catalogue

The performance impact isn't consistent but the latter tends to result in drop-outs on its own, whereas it requires a combination of one or more of the first 3 to have an impact.

Clearly, my server is significantly less powered than the OP setup.

BTW, I know I could fix the first 3 by doing them on p.c. and then transferring fully tagged and analysed files to the server - just haven't got round to changing my 'process' yet. This is the process for new purchases, so I'm invariably very keen to start listening.