On Tue, Nov 9, 2010 at 9:40 AM, Travis Tabbal <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:travis@tabbal.net">travis@tabbal.net</a>></span> wrote:<br><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
<br><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div class="im">On Tue, Nov 9, 2010 at 8:36 AM, Christopher Meredith <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:chmeredith@gmail.com" target="_blank">chmeredith@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<br><div class="gmail_quote"><div>So the filesystem isn't the problem and it looks like the drive isn't the problem. I can't imagine the software would be the problem because VLC, XBMC, Xine, and mplayer all have buffering problems while playing my these recordings also. And some of the recordings are ATSC, some are from the HD-PVR. These are just data dumps from the devices; there's no processing by the backend.<br>
<br>I've got to be missing something. What should I check next?<br></div></div></blockquote></div><div><br><br>Controller port? How is the speed on the local machine with a disk benchmark? What else is running on that machine and drive? If the local speed test is OK, how about a network speed test without the drive? <br>
</div></div></blockquote><div><br>The only disk benchmark I've run is 'hdparm -Tt /dev/sdb', from which I get these results:<br><br>/dev/sdb:<br> Timing cached reads: 2620 MB in 2.00 seconds = 1309.43 MB/sec<br>
Timing buffered disk reads: 182 MB in 3.01 seconds = 60.41 MB/sec<br><br>This is comparable to other disks on the system that are working fine. The drive in question is a dedicated DVR recordings drive. It's a 160GB SATA drive with one big ext4 partition.<br>
<br>This is a combined FE/BE (using VDPAU) so the network isn't the problem. I have made sure there aren't any CPU-intensive actions occurring, such as commercial flagging. During the times that the buffering problems persist, the most intensive process is mythfrontend and it never goes about 10% CUP usage.<br>
<br>I don't know if this is relevant or related, but a few months back, shortly after a trunk upgrade, I noticed that LiveTV would occasionally suffer an extremely brief pause. This would happen every few seconds or so. I found that pressing pause until there was about a 10-second buffer would fix the problem. Thinking back on it, I'm not sure there was a good reason I should have had to do that, and now I'm wondering whether it's related to this problem. The behavior I'm seeing now is like that brief pause, only longer and more often.<br>
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