This has happened quite a bit to me -probably once per evening while watching recorded TV. I'll be watching a show in Kodi or through Windows Media Center and the video will pause for a few seconds (or sometimes just a quick pause) and then carry on. Like it's buffering.

 

I was able to "resolve" the problem in Kodi by modifying my advancedsettings.xml to buffer all local traffic.

 

Unfortunately, there's no such setting in Windows Media Center. So, that means I need to get to the root of the problem.

 

Any help would be appreciated. Syslog attached. The issue happened 4/5/2017 at around 9:43-9:44pm. Nothing stands out to me in the log, but maybe the experts will see something I'm missing.

 

I'm using the same drives/hardware/network that was once running Windows Server 2012 Essentials and this never happened there. That probably means it's not hardware/network related.

 

Thanks!

syslog-20170405-2148.zip

Edited April 6, 20179 yr by NNate

Any ideas of things I can try to alleviate this problem?

 

It's hard to test as it doesn't happen all the time. Maybe once per evening.

Post up both your diagnostics file and your hardware configuration.  You should also mention what Dockers and plugins you are using.  You can also reboot all of your network devices (switches and routers) and see if that makes a difference.  (Even if most of the hardware is recycled from an earlier configuration that doesn't automatically everything will perform exactly the same way.)

Found these looking through your Syslog thou:

Could have a drive acting up. 

 

Apr  1 02:21:56 KooistraServer kernel: blk_update_request: I/O error, dev sdn, sector 160517576

Apr  5 04:30:10 KooistraServer kernel: blk_update_request: I/O error, dev sdn, sector 488509856

 

 

3 hours ago, kizer said:

Found these looking through your Syslog thou:

Could have a drive acting up. 

 

Apr  1 02:21:56 KooistraServer kernel: blk_update_request: I/O error, dev sdn, sector 160517576

Apr  5 04:30:10 KooistraServer kernel: blk_update_request: I/O error, dev sdn, sector 488509856

 

 

sdn is an "unassigned device" that I use for computer backups. I'm guessing that's unrelated to my streaming issue since I don't have any media on it, but I could be wrong.

 

4 hours ago, Frank1940 said:

Post up both your diagnostics file and your hardware configuration.  You should also mention what Dockers and plugins you are using.  You can also reboot all of your network devices (switches and routers) and see if that makes a difference.  (Even if most of the hardware is recycled from an earlier configuration that doesn't automatically everything will perform exactly the same way.)

Diagnostics file attached.

 

Motherboard:AsRock Z97-Extreme 4

CPU: i5-4690K

RAM: 16GB

Sata: Onboard Intel, M1015 with LSI firmware, H310 with LSI firmware (both in IT mode)

Network: Onboard Intel Gigabit

 

Dockers:

• EmbyServer
• CUPS
• linuxserver's deluge
• linuxserver's sonarr
• linuxserver's tvheadend
• Krusader (normally disabled)
• linuxserver's Unifi (disabled)

Plugins:

• Advanced Buttons
• Community Apps
• Dynamix Local Master
• Dynamix SSD Trim
• Dynamix System Buttons
• Dynamix System Info
• Dynamix System Stats
• Dynamix System Temp
• Fix Common Problems
• Nerd tools
• Open Files
• Preclear
• Unassigned Devices

 

diagnostics-20170410-1840.zip

Edited April 11, 20179 yr by NNate

I see you don't have cachedirs, other disks spinning up during playback may cause what you see, you can confirm by temporarily disabling spin down.

Did you resolve all of the 'Errors' that Fix Common Problems found? 

 

Have you run a long SMART test sdn  (ST1000DM003-1CH162_Z1D7WDZS )? 

On 4/11/2017 at 2:38 AM, johnnie.black said:

I see you don't have cachedirs, other disks spinning up during playback may cause what you see, you can confirm by temporarily disabling spin down.

I think this may be my problem. I found I was always getting the pauses at around 9:44pm. So I looked and saw that Emby was scanning my media library every 12 hours which happened to line up to 9:44pm. I rescheduled that to the middle of the night and had no problems last night while watching TV.

 

Is there any workaround for the pauses caused by disks spinning up other than disabling spin down? Just seems odd that a disk not involved in the streaming would impact the stream.

 

Would installing cachedirs with default settings deal with this?

 

On 4/11/2017 at 7:02 AM, Frank1940 said:

Did you resolve all of the 'Errors' that Fix Common Problems found? 

 

Have you run a long SMART test sdn  (ST1000DM003-1CH162_Z1D7WDZS )? 

I ran a long SMART test on sdn, it passed.

 

Also, I fixed most of those errors related to TVHeadend, but some of them are going have to remain for it to work with my HDHomerun.

1 minute ago, NNate said:

Is there any workaround for the pauses caused by disks spinning up other than disabling spin down? Just seems odd that a disk not involved in the streaming would impact the stream.

Introduced by the controller, not by unRaid...

2 minutes ago, Squid said:

Introduced by the controller, not by unRaid...

Are there other controllers that deal with this better? Both of mine are LSI 92xx chipsets (M1015 and H310 in IT with LSI firmware)

Might adding an PCI-E SATA card and moving your "media" drive(s) to it and dedicating the media share to these drives be an option?

No idea.  Mine (SAS2LP) also suffers from it...  You can work around it a bit by using spinup groups within unRaid (ie: disk2 will always spin up with disk1)

Right now I don't have any included/excluded disks on my share info. Just the default of include all, exclude none.

 

If I want to start doing this with my existing shares, how should I go about this as I'm assuming creating those inclusion/exclusion settings won't move existing data.

 

I'm guessing I'll need to manually move the data to the appropriate /mnt/disk location?

Edited April 15, 20179 yr by NNate

Wasn't talking about includes / excludes.  But rather spin up groups.  You can enable spin up groups in settings - disk settings.

 

Then from main clicking into each drive you can assign them a spin up group.  If you have say disk 1 & 2 assigned to the same group, whenever 1 spins up the other will at the same time.  Useful if you have a share confined to certain disks.  (And if Emby happens to rescan those disks while you're playing -> no spin up pause will be induced)

 

Myself, I only find it particularly useful with music shares that span disks.  I have Kodi set to automatically scan at 3 in the morning, so it doesn't interfere, and for the odd time a new DL is copied while a movie is actively being watched, the slight pause is livable for me... 

 

But, since your shares span all disks, your option is to put everything into the same group or play around with increasing the buffer on your players..

Edited April 15, 20179 yr by Squid

2 minutes ago, Squid said:

Wasn't talking about includes / excludes.  But rather spin up groups.  You can enable spin up groups in settings - disk settings.

 

Then from main clicking into each drive you can assign them a spin up group.  If you have say disk 1 & 2 assigned to the same group, whenever 1 spins up the other will at the same time.  Useful if you have a share confined to certain disks.  (And if Emby happens to rescan those disks while you're playing -> no spin up pause will be induced)

 

Myself, I only find it particularly useful with music shares that span disks.  I have Kodi set to automatically scan at 3 in the morning, so it doesn't interfere, and for the odd time a new DL is copied while a movie is actively being watched, the slight pause is livable for me... 

 

But, since your shares span all disks, your option is to put everything into the same group or play around with increasing the buffer on your players..

Yeah, I gotcha.

 

Since my server is 90% video I was thinking of dedicating 1 drive to non-video and the others to video. Then I could use the spin up groups more effectively.

 

Thanks for all the help, this has been very informative!

18 minutes ago, NNate said:

I'm guessing I'll need to manually move the data to the appropriate /mnt/disk location?

 

Should you decide to do this, you have to make the 'moves' from disk share to disk share.  Never, NEVER copy/move between a disk share and a user share.   There is a real potential for data loss!

5 hours ago, NNate said:

Right now I don't have any included/excluded disks on my share info. Just the default of include all, exclude none.

 

If I want to start doing this with my existing shares, how should I go about this as I'm assuming creating those inclusion/exclusion settings won't move existing data.

 

I'm guessing I'll need to manually move the data to the appropriate /mnt/disk location?

 

You can assign (include/exclude disks per share).  You just have to identify which disk(s) you want to purpose for your video media.  For moving existing data you can use docker "unBalance".

 

By excluding the disks dedicated for video media from other shares using you'll free up IOPS so that those drives aren't being leveraged by other apps/dockers/vm's