April 29, 200818 yr I've been trouble shooting my HD playback across my network all weekend and today I finally found where the issue lies... my unRAID server. I can transfer a file across my network at 60+ Mbs... but I can only transfer to the unRAID server at about 14 Mbs and can only read at about 20 Mbs. This is causing issues with the audio/video in my HD feeds. My setup is as follows: Motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-MA69GM-S2H PSU: CORSAIR CMPSU-620HX ATX12V v2.2 and EPS12V 2.91 620W RAM: G.SKILL 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ Brisbane 2.6GHz Socket AM2 65W Dual-Core Black Edition Back Planes (2 of them): Athena Power BP-SATA3051B 3 x 5.25" SATA Cards (2 of them): PROMISE SATA300 TX4 PCI SATA II Controller (not being used yet... still only using the SATA off the MOBO. Flash Drive: Lexar 1GB Firefly I've been through the BIOS many times... LAN is enabled... usb 2.0 is enabled... everything should be working correctly. It's also worth noting that my system takes a while to boot. I had emailed tech support (spoke... or in this case wrote, to Tom) when I first got my FireFly drive and was told my boot times were too long. Basically, after all my BIOS screens are done and I get on the bzimage and bzroot page, bzimage takes about 5 seconds but bzroot takes roughly 40 seconds (dots on the screen........). After bzroot finishes it takes another 30 or so seconds to finish loading everything before the unRAID server is online and ready to use. So including my BIOS my system takes a little over 2 minutes to complete boot from a cold state. Now... could this somehow be the cause of my slow network speeds? Maybe there's some issue with the onboard USB or my FireFly drive and that's causing the slow down (as in when it tries to access the OS on the drive it takes a while and slows down the transfer). I'm not really sure where to look here or what to do to increase my transfer speeds. The current 14 Mbs writing and 20Mbs reading from the server is way too slow though for my needs. I've checked all my cables and network and am 100% certain it's either the unRAID software or the hardware it's running on. Any advice on what I can check?
April 29, 200818 yr Author Also... the RJ-45 LAN port on the back is lit up orange once unRAID is loaded... and orange means it's running at gigabit speeds. So is this unRAID software not fully supporting my mobo/network port? I bought this mobo because it was listed as compatible on the hardware compatibility page.
April 29, 200818 yr my system takes about 2 minutes to boot as well and i have no problems. My server isn't spec'd as high as yours and i can stream HD to all 4 clients at the same time watching the same or different movies over GigE. Are you running Vista?
April 29, 200818 yr Only way for anyone to know more of what is happening on your server is for you to post a copy of your syslog. Follow the instructions here: http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=Troubleshooting As far as network speeds go, lots of possibilities, from incompatible MTU sizes, to poor quality cables, to poor quality network switches, to interrupt conflicts on your motherboard. The syslog will help The output of this command ifconfig will tell more about the LAN. Also, it sounds as if your motherboard BIOS is treating your USB Flash drive as version 1.0, instead of the much higher speed USB 2.0, causing the longer boot times. Joe L.
April 29, 200818 yr Just to confirm terminology, do you mean "Mbps" (bits - what you wrote) or "MBps" (bytes)? 14/20 MBps is typical and would not be a problem for HD streaming. Also, how are you measuring it? Bill
April 29, 200818 yr Author my system takes about 2 minutes to boot as well and i have no problems. My server isn't spec'd as high as yours and i can stream HD to all 4 clients at the same time watching the same or different movies over GigE. Are you running Vista? Good to know the boot time is ok. Yea... my HTPC is running Vista x86. I can read a file from my unRAID server to that computer at about 20 MB/s... but from that some computer it can transfer a file to another server of mine (running Windows Home Server) at 60-80 MB/s.
April 29, 200818 yr Author Just to confirm terminology, do you mean "Mbps" (bits - what you wrote) or "MBps" (bytes)? 14/20 MBps is typical and would not be a problem for HD streaming. Also, how are you measuring it? Bill Sorry... 14-20 Mega Bytes per second. An HD file can use over 20 Mega Bytes per second at certain times... so 20 isn't enough for trouble free playback from just one computer. I'm measuring the speed during a windows file transfer. Transferring a 20 Gig file across the network it shows the remaining time and the speed. Granted, I'm sure it's not the most accurate... but it's at least close.
April 29, 200818 yr Author Only way for anyone to know more of what is happening on your server is for you to post a copy of your syslog. Follow the instructions here: http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=Troubleshooting As far as network speeds go, lots of possibilities, from incompatible MTU sizes, to poor quality cables, to poor quality network switches, to interrupt conflicts on your motherboard. The syslog will help The output of this command ifconfig will tell more about the LAN. Also, it sounds as if your motherboard BIOS is treating your USB Flash drive as version 1.0, instead of the much higher speed USB 2.0, causing the longer boot times. Joe L. Sorry... I should have attached this from the beginning. I've read a bunch of posts on here and you always request the syslog from your sig. The cables are all new and I've swapped them out with other cables just to check. Their CAT6 550 hz and I've tried CAT6 500hz as well as cat6e. All of my other PC's (1 vista x64, 1 vista x86, and 1 Windows XP) have slow transfer and reading speeds from the unRAID server. I'm thinking at this point that the NIC isn't fully supported in the unRAID software... but hopefully you can tell me exactly what it could be after reading my syslog. Thank you for the quick replies everyone. Edit: I don't know how to run the ipconfig from within the linux/dos interface. I checked the log and couldn't find anything named "ipconfig," so if I need to run a command before generating the log let me know exactly what I need to type
April 29, 200818 yr The command is ifconfig, not ipconfig. ipconfig is the command on windows. ifconfig is the command on linux. (I don't know why they named it so similar, or who came first) An example output is here: [pre]root@Tower:~# ifconfig eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:11:11:75:FB:7E inet addr:192.168.2.2 Bcast:192.168.2.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 UP BROADCAST NOTRAILERS RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:492606375 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:398702434 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:2704504308 (2.5 GiB) TX bytes:1573957472 (1.4 GiB) lo Link encap:Local Loopback inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0 UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1 RX packets:869 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:869 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 RX bytes:96932 (94.6 KiB) TX bytes:96932 (94.6 KiB) [/pre]
April 29, 200818 yr Author The command is ifconfig, not ipconfig. ipconfig is the command on windows. ifconfig is the command on linux. (I don't know why they named it so similar, or who came first) An example output is here: [pre]root@Tower:~# ifconfig eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:11:11:75:FB:7E inet addr:192.168.2.2 Bcast:192.168.2.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 UP BROADCAST NOTRAILERS RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:492606375 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:398702434 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:2704504308 (2.5 GiB) TX bytes:1573957472 (1.4 GiB) lo Link encap:Local Loopback inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0 UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1 RX packets:869 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:869 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 RX bytes:96932 (94.6 KiB) TX bytes:96932 (94.6 KiB) [/pre] Got it. Here's what it outputs: eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HQaddr 00:1D:7D:D8:34:AA inet addr:192.168.1.62 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:236 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets: 139 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:22487 (21.9 KiB) TX bytes:41121 (40.1 KiB) Interrupt:7 lo Link encap: Local Loopback inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0 UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1 RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 RX bytes:0 (0.0 b) TX bytes:0 (0.0 b)
April 29, 200818 yr Everything I read talks about 20Mbits/sec as the HD requirement, though I have heard that can go up a bit (sorry). 160Mbits/sec (20MB/sec) is far higher than that. I'm wondering if perhaps there is an issue here unrelated to your average read speeds. After all, there are folks running 100Mb networks (so 12MB cap) that run HD just fine. I have GigE and can run multiple HD streams with no difficulty and my read speeds aren't much better than 20MB/sec. Bill
April 29, 200818 yr Author Everything I read talks about 20Mbits/sec as the HD requirement, though I have heard that can go up a bit (sorry). 160Mbits/sec (20MB/sec) is far higher than that. I'm wondering if perhaps there is an issue here unrelated to your average read speeds. After all, there are folks running 100Mb networks (so 12MB cap) that run HD just fine. I have GigE and can run multiple HD streams with no difficulty and my read speeds aren't much better than 20MB/sec. Bill The folks on the 100Mb networks that are running HD are probably watching compressed files encoded in h264 or xvid. Their HD files are around 5-6 Gigs and streaming those are much easier. My HD files are complete blu-ray rips... so the file size is between 18-25 gigs (for the 4 movies I've ripped thus far). HD streaming aside.. the transfer speed to and from the unRAID server are way to slow compared the the other computers and server on my network. It doesn't make sense for the unRAID server to send a file to one of my PC's at 20MB/s while the server sitting next to it (Windows Home Server) can send that same file at 70 MB/s. I understand there should be some delays with writing on the unRAID server due to the parity drive... and that may even effect reading speeds as well (again, due to parity), but it shouldn't slow things down that much.
April 30, 200818 yr The folks on the 100Mb networks that are running HD are probably watching compressed files encoded in h264 or xvid. Their HD files are around 5-6 Gigs and streaming those are much easier. My HD files are complete blu-ray rips... so the file size is between 18-25 gigs (for the 4 movies I've ripped thus far). Normal DVD streaming requires something like 0.6MB/sec, a 25GB BR DVD (with no further compression) streamed over 90 minutes requires (let me break out the calculator ...) 4.6MB/sec (broadcast HD is about half that). Of course those are averages, but whenever I look at network utilization when playing either SD or HD videos I see very little variation in network traffic. You may want to pursue two different tracks: 1) figure out how to increase your unraid's average read and write performance, and 2) figure out what else may be causing the stuttering in HD. To help w/#1, have you checked out the performance tweak? http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=965.0 Bill
April 30, 200818 yr Author The folks on the 100Mb networks that are running HD are probably watching compressed files encoded in h264 or xvid. Their HD files are around 5-6 Gigs and streaming those are much easier. My HD files are complete blu-ray rips... so the file size is between 18-25 gigs (for the 4 movies I've ripped thus far). Normal DVD streaming requires something like 0.6MB/sec, a 25GB BR DVD (with no further compression) streamed over 90 minutes requires (let me break out the calculator ...) 4.6MB/sec (broadcast HD is about half that). Of course those are averages, but whenever I look at network utilization when playing either SD or HD videos I see very little variation in network traffic. You may want to pursue two different tracks: 1) figure out how to increase your unraid's average read and write performance, and 2) figure out what else may be causing the stuttering in HD. To help w/#1, have you checked out the performance tweak? http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=965.0 Bill I agree. I'm unsure why I'm getting stuttering in some of my HD movies. I've been trying to track this down for the last week. Ripping them differently, using different programs, computers, OS's, swapping hardware, ect... I'm working on that. But I noticed that my transfer speeds to the unRAID server are very slow. This "could" be part of the issue... but "could" not as well. In either case, it is an issue I'd like to at least fix Solving #1 will help me along in solving #2. Edit: I tried adding that line of code to my go file... didn't make a difference. Still transfering right now from unRAID to my PC at 22.1 MB/sec. Edit 2: I tried again and now it's downloading at 40 MB/sec just like the original poster was getting. Is this just the way unRAID works? Is there anyone that gets over 40 MB/sec reading from their unRAID servers? Edit 3: My speeds are all over the place. Sometimes I'll be getting 24 MB/sec when downloading a file. Sometimes 30 MB/sec... sometimes 40 MB/sec. Seems to vary. It's the same file too. I'll start the download, wait a minute or two and check the speed. Stop it. Start it again. The next time I may get the same speed or it may be faster or slower. It's like rolling dice
April 30, 200818 yr Author Well... I updated from 4.2 to the latest 4.3b6 and my network speeds have increased immensely! I now have a download speed from the unRAID server of 55 MB/s and an upload speed of 25 MB/s. That's an increase of over 100% for downloading and a 78% increase in write speeds... nice I'm happy enough with those speeds... and I'll even add a cache drive which should increase things even more. But... I still think I'm going to get a new MOBO. I really want one with the ICH9R controller so I can have 8 on board SATA connections. I created a new thread asking if the Marvell 88E8052 LAN chipset is supported by linux/unRAID. If anyone knows could you let me know so I can order this new board and get everything setup for good http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=1909.0
May 1, 200818 yr Author I thought I'd give an update. I installed an Intel NIC into this MOBO and tested my speeds... it made a huge difference. I can now download from the unRAID server at 80+ MB/sec. Write speeds are still at around 25 MB/sec. I bought a 250 gig drive to use as a cache drive so once I have that installed my write speeds should be much better. I'm guessing the speed difference is because the Intel NIC is better supported by linux then my mobo's on board LAN?
May 9, 200818 yr I am confused. Have you put the intel NIC on the UNRAID box or the media player. I thought UNRAID had to use an onboard LAN. Can it use a PCI LAN instead?
May 9, 200818 yr I am confused. Have you put the intel NIC on the UNRAID box or the media player. I thought UNRAID had to use an onboard LAN. Can it use a PCI LAN instead? The reason some motherboards with on-board LAN chipsets ar preferred is that some of them have a separate bus that keeps the data off of the PCI bus where it has to share the bandwidth with the data going to the disk controllers in the other PCI slots. Many people have put together unRAID servers with PCI card based network interfaces. The Intel card described above is very popular with those whose motherboard based controller is not supported, or does not perform as well. You just need to disable the motherboard based controller if you add in a PCI card with a network interface. Joe L.
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.