Bugzilla – Bug 4569
Latest 6.5.1 nightly produces frequent stuttering in local music
Last modified: 2011-03-16 04:35:05 UTC
Hi, I'm using a Transporter w/ the latest SlimServer 6.5.1 nightly over a 802.11g wireless link w/ ~90% signal strength. I've been frequently upgrading to the nightly releases every couple weeks in hopes that the knob functionality will improve. Last night, I upgraded a *perfectly functioning* nightly from around 11/15/2006 to the 12/5/2006 nightly. Ever since, I've been getting frequent stutters (1/4 sec dropout) every 5-10 minutes or so. There is no obvious pattern to when or where they occur. I just upgraded to the 12/6/2006 nightly and the issue is still happening. Please understand that I'm a seasoned SlimServer user with a highly optimized configuration which has worked perfectly since the Transporter arrived at my door. I sincerely believe this has something to do with the latest couple nightlies as I have not touched anything else in my entire configuration (server, OS, wireless network config, etc). The server load is no different from before, its not doing anything other than running SlimServer like it always has. Please let me know what sort of info you need to help you understand this issue. Cheers, Daniel
please do not preset targets. These are for internal use only, after reviewing new reports.
I would like to know what kind of tracks you are playing when the stuttering occurs. Local, you say. Are they on the same machine that is running slimserver, or a network-attached drive? What is the format of the music? Wav? mp3? flac? Do you notice any difference if you listen to different albums or formats of music? Additionally, a log including d_source and d_slimproto might be useful. Thanks! P.S., what kind of problem are you having with the knob?
Hi there, Thanks for the response. My music library is served off a FreeBSD 6.2 machine through a Linksys WAP54G wireless network to my Transporter in the next room. The hard drive is a 300GB PATA drive right on the same machine, formatted and mounted as a normal FreeBSD disk would be. My library is all encoded in FLAC and I stream it normally. Unfortunately I don't have any other formats of music in the library at this time. I've attached a log file (rather large) including the d_source and d_slimproto output you requested. I played music long enough to make sure I got some of these dropouts we've spoken about. The log file is fresh as of my testing for you today and doesn't contain any old data, however. My hunch here is that something in the latest firmware may have produced these dropouts, but that is just a hunch... Cheers, Daniel P.S. The knob issues I'm having are primarily when I'm cruising through one of my large lists (200+ entries e.g.: artists, albums). After a decently large number of entries pass (30-50), the knob will stop tracking ahead. While I keep turning, letting go, turning, letting go in the same direction I was going all along, the list will advance ahead an item or two, skip back 3-4 items, advance ahead a little, and so on. I have to completely let go of the knob for a good 15-20 seconds and then it usually starts working again.
Created attachment 1731 [details] Log file as requested
Just for my own notes, the files appear to be primarily flac
I had infrequent short dropouts (1/4 second or so about once per listening session of a couple of hours). See this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=30088 Contrary to the reference in the thread, I don't believe my problem was related to DHCP as the lease times are 24 hours and the issue occurred within an hour or two after booting up the computer. This was coupled with an intermittent and similarly infrequent problem with the playlist not advancing to the next song. FWIW I have not noticed *either* problem since I rolled back to v. 67 of the firmware. Using 11/30 nightly SS build 10797, firmware v. 67, Win XP Pro, SB3, Homeplug ethernet, USB drive containing mostly flac files.
Thanks for referring your post, Jeff. This sounds like the issues I'm experiencing, however, like you my lease times are already set quite long (2 days). Also, last night for the first time I noticed the second issue you describe in your comment where it was not advancing from song to song in a playlist. I haven't changed *anything* on my setup since the filing of this bug report, yet that issue didn't show itself until last night. I'm thinking I may downgrade until the next FW comes out. What is the process of downgrading anyways?
Ooops, please excuse an error in the last post. Here are the settings in my dhcpd.conf file for my DHCP server: default-lease-time 600; max-lease-time 7200; So, it *is* possible that the lease time is a problem. I was remembering a different DHCP server that I run. I'm going to increase it to 86400 now and see if it changes the behavior.
Ok, so I changed the lease times on my server to 86400 seconds (1 day) and the problem seems to have gone away. Seems like this is what the issue is about. What's the ETA on a fix for this?
Firmware 81 has been out for some time and fixed a number of DHCP issues. Are either of you still having problems?
Christopher, I am still using firmware 67 as I have seen no reference to this bug being addressed by subsequent versions of firmware. My problems existed both with static IP addresses and with DHCP so I don't believe DHCP was an issue with me. I have not had a glitch or ANY issues since rolling back to firmware 67 so I guess I am a little lazy in not wanting to try the new firmware without knowing it solves the issue.
You're allowed to be lazy. :) However, you seem to be the only one having this problem. I'm going to mark it as 'works for me' for now to keep my managers from freaking out about open critical bugs. If you or anyone else are still seeing this, please feel free to re-open it and we'll continue trying to reproduce it here.