While playing ANY type of media file (DVD, MKV Movie, etc), I basically can't do anything that touches the unRAID server otherwise get SERIOUS stuttering with the video (on dedicated HTPC, Popcorn Hour, or my primary Windows PC, both of the latter Dual Core 2 2.6+ CPU's with 4+ GB RAM).  Even clicking on a share in Windows will bring the video to a standstill.  I'm running GIG Network everywhere, and think I have a fairly OK setup with fast drives and decent SATA performance.  Normal?  I've been on the 4.5 Betas for so long, I can't really remember if it did it before with the 4.4.x versions.

 

Asus P5B-VM DO MB

Intel® Celeron® CPU 440  @ 2.00GHz CPU

4 GB Ram

I have

 

(2) 750 GB Drives via PATA

(1) Cache Drive va ESATA

(15) SATA, 7 onboard 8 via Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 8 Channel 300MB/S Per Channel 64 Bit Pci-X Interface Serial ATA Adapter

 

anyone see anything goofy with my syslog that could cause these performance issues?

 

This syslog only covers one minute, from boot to final logged message, so I can't tell if it also covered some testing after that.  If you did try some performance tests, with expected stuttering, there are no issues or errors posted at all.  As far as I can tell, there are no real problems in the machine setup, that would indicate performance problems later.  The network setup is not smooth, rather slow, with some repetitive statements.  I don't see errors, just a slow setup, that *might* be suspicious.  I would check an ifconfig report for clean transmissions, also try some of the other console commands found in the Console Commands for Networking section.  Compare an initial ifconfig report with one taken after testing the server hard, with lots of stuttering.

 

A minor issue, there are quite a few Seagates that appear to still have their SATA150 jumpers installed, so see the Improving unRAID Performance page, Remove SATA150 Jumper section.  I don't expect this to make much of a difference though.

 

As noted by someone else, you are running 16 data drives which is a beta feature.  You are also using NFS support, another beta feature, which certainly qualifies you for posting in the beta thread!  Those are 2 of the only 3 features (the other being Active Directory support) that I would consider still unstable, from user reports of issues.  It is possible therefore that you are running into a problem involving the beta support for either the increased drive count or the NFS support, but I see no actual errors related to either in the syslog.  Perhaps a longer syslog covering a period where you hammer the server with stutter producing actions, might reveal something further.

 

For completeness, the original posts start here:  http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=3764.msg36616#msg36616

Is it possible that your drive accesses are causing drives to spin up? Spin up operations seem to cause a system-wide pause that stutters video as you describe.

This a known and oft reported issue... I have it on my 4.4 box as well...

 

 

This a known and oft reported issue... I have it on my 4.4 box as well...

 

 

 

Well, I think it is also very much depending on the drivers - I had the same on my windows box - after changing to different controllers and drivers this disappeared (blocking of transfer when disks spinning up). But unfortunately it is not predictable. When I find the time I will do some tests to see, if I can get a "nonblocking" operation with unraid too...