Kodi Buffering issues?

[hermy65]

For the better part of 4 months ive been having an issue with my kodi instances buffering so ive been trying to resolve it and unfortunately have not made much progress. First off, my unRAID box is running on dual Xeon E5-2630 v4's and 64GB of ECC RAM. All of my kodi instances are on my wired gigabit LAN and yet they constantly buffer/cache, sometimes its every 5-10 minutes, other times its every 20-30 seconds. I dont notice anything on my unRAID machine that should be causing it but im out of ideas. I am using mariadb to host the SQL DB my Kodi instances point to but i cant foresee that being the issue. 

 

Any insight would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

[AiRLAC]

unRAID version? Network protocol?

[hermy65]

UnRAID 6.6.3, shares are SMB

[AiRLAC]

4 minutes ago, hermy65 said:

UnRAID 6.6.3, shares are SMB

First try a rollback to 6.6.1. I had issues with 6.6.3 and NFS shares, similar symptoms like your one.

[hermy65]

I actually had the issue with 6.6.1 as well, just bumped to 6.6.3 to see if it was any better. Should I try NFS shares instead of SMB? Is there a reason to use NFS over SMB to begin with?

[AiRLAC]

5 minutes ago, hermy65 said:

I actually had the issue with 6.6.1 as well, just bumped to 6.6.3 to see if it was any better. Should I try NFS shares instead of SMB? Is there a reason to use NFS over SMB to begin with?

If you are running Kodi over something *nix based (i.e. not Windows) then NFS is better, lower cpu overhead and slightly better througput and slighty lower latency. I'm running OpenELEC on multiple devices and all using NFS.

[hermy65]

Interesting, I may spin up an NFS share and see if that helps at all

[tjb_altf4]

I'm running a similar setup to that mentioned in first post with no issues ever in 2 years since I moved to unRAID (with a LibreELEC endpoint).

Might be hardware or buffer settings on the KODI client/endpoints, or possibly something like torrents thrashing disks the video is on.

[hermy65]

Ant chance you could share your buffer settings? 

[tjb_altf4]

I don't have anything set, so system defaults only, but this is how you can tune: https://kodi.wiki/view/HOW-TO:Modify_the_video_cache?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss