Streaming Stuttering

dvdluvver

Good afternoon!

DrivePool has been working flawlessly for me for quite some time now.   I am using the lastest release build.

I have a 16 drive pool (19TB) that I use to store pretty much everything from TV shows to family photos.  Everything is duplicated.

In the past week I have developed a stutter when streaming to my various players.   Anyone recommend a way to perhaps pinpoint which drive might be the culprit, or how to see if maybe DP itself is hiccuping a bit?   I have Stablebit Scanner installed and all my discs are healthy.   It's nothing earthshattering, but just annoying enough to want to investigate.

Thanks!

Ron

saitoh183

To figure out what is going on, you could try opening the Performance monitor  (task manager - Performance Tab) and check the Hard disk activity to see what is going on on your disks. 

jdpg2

Also check if you have backup software running, like Crash plan.  I found that with it set to continuous backup, i sometimes got shuttering.  BTW crash plan works perfectly just need to do on site and off site backups after "streaming" hours

santiagodraco

What is stuttering?  Is it all streaming files (movies, tv and audio?)   If it's low data rate files, such as music, then you most likely have a problem with CPU utilization on the server due to active processes.

Some things to check:

1.  Search indexer.   Look into scheduling indexes to only run on off peak hours.
2.  Look for any process using more than 0% cpu utilization.  In general only the system process should be constantly over 0, however some processes will run slightly over 0 when they are very disc intensive (search indexer, drive fragmentation, etc).  For example iTunes is notorious for running at 13% cpu at idle.  
3.  If only large video files are skipping you might simply have performance issues on the server.  However since you implied that nothing has changed hardware wise this likely isn't the case.
4.  Are you running a wired or wireless network?  

dvdluvver

Hi, guys!

Thanks for your suggestions, and it was helpful in troubleshooting.   It seems that it might be an issue with whatever codec is currently processing my "XViD" videos.  I have Blu-Ray's ripped to H.264 and they play without a problem.  It's a relatively new HTPC setup (Win7 Media Center running on a Mac Mini), so perhaps I have the setup a little off from my old machine that ran without a hitch.   Nice to know it's not the server!

I think I need to start converting my XViD's to H.264 anyway.   Too bad that's literally thousands of video files.  

Thanks!