Bugzilla – Bug 9018
Controller loses SC connection when music storage disk "slows down"
Last modified: 2008-11-03 15:56:21 UTC
As reported in this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?p=324795#post324795 " Still having many problems I have been trying to set up my squeezebox Duet for several days. I keep losing the connection to my SB (Controller gives all the messages you can read in this Thread. Sometimes I get a connection but that lasts for a few minutes. If I try to play songs during that time I get the blinking > for a longer period of time and then the connection to my computer is lost (then I can play songs on the SB by using Squeezecenter in my Browser). If it doesn't lose connection inmediately it takes ages to select songs. Getting a list with artists takes like 2 minutes (3800 songs on a network disk). Even SqueezeCenter in the browser is slow. I play songs via OTSJUke via the same Network and everything works instantly (also with Windows Media Player). The SC Cache directory is like 60+ Mbyte for just 3800 songs... I rebuild it completely a few times to ensure nothing was wrong. If I select another song it takes sometimes 30 seconds before it starts playing. THis improved a bit by giving the process Real Time Priority! MEmory is enough (1.5 GB on a 3 GHz XP machine). My setup: Hybrid TCP address SB 172.16.134.2 TCP controller 172.16.134.1 Subnetmask 255.255.255.0 Firmware SB 36 Software controller7.1r2722 Software SqueezeCenter-versie: 7.1 - 22170 @ Mon Jul 28 13:36:57 PDT 2008 - Windows XP - NL - cp1252 I got the DUet with the 7.01 software but after the first issues I updated to 7.1 Switching of AVAST Virus scanner and my Firewall doesn't help anything. All my other equipment (6PC's, 3 Network drives, 2 Network Printers, 5 Network Cameras work great on the network..... I switched of the cameras during working with the Duet to ensure maximun Network Bandwith. Everything including the SB is wired. The Controller is connected via the Squeezebox. I have tried it via my wireless router however this didn't give any improvements either." (will post my comments in a new post)
I started seeing very similar behavior last Thursday... it turns out that on Thursday one of the drives in my NAS array started having errors and the network access to that unit has been extremely slow ever since. Fast enough to stream music, but too slow for the Controller I guess. Almost every time I use the controller now it looses connection to the SqueezeCenter server even though music is playing just fine. I have to attribute this change in behavior to the slow back-end storage of the music library.. (4200+ flac songs over NFS).
Finally, here's an email Dean got over the weekend: " Hi, Many people have been complaining about the controller losing connection to the music source. I have been experiencing this as well (see: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showpost.php?p=324795&postcount=246) I think I have found the how to solve the issue. After experimenting with some different disk units I found out that the throughput of the disk is extremely important. A slow (network) drive causes the problem instantly. It does not matter if you have the Database/Cache on the internal fsat drive. If the actual track files (MP# or whatever) reside on the slow disk the problem occurs as soon as the individual songs have to be presented on the controller. I think you have build in some max. response times in the slim server software that are exceeded at that moment combined with some strange error handling. My suggestion increase the delay time (or give users the ability to change it) and adapt the error handling. I hope this hleps to make the product more stable. "
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 9004 ***