SMB reading issues

1st Official Post

    Hi guys,

    Been using LE since the fork occurred (before was on OE) and on RPI2-RPI4. Starting from latest builds of version 8 on rpi3 and finishing on latest 9.2.3 on RPI4 (recently moire often) having issues with film freezing and then bringing me back to home screen. In my setup I use only out of the box plugins, no live tv - only playback HD/FullHD movies located on my NAS via SMB shares. I've been using 2 different NASes: D-Link in the past and currently FreeNas. And in 90% of the cases I cannot watch movie from start to end titles without freezed film and then being brought back to home screen.

    Here is what I see i the logs:

    I had to change advanced settings in the past so here they are:

    Code
    <advancedsettings>
    <cache>
        <buffermode>1</buffermode>
        <memorysize>52428800</memorysize>
        <readfactor>4.0</readfactor>
    </cache>
</advancedsettings>

    I would understand if it was buffering issue where it was reading slow, but log says it's a connection timeout which means no connection at all. My RPI4 and NAS are connected via gigabit switch, are in the same subnet, my Win PC can read/write from/to that share with 112Mb/s which is basically top speed of the gigabit connection and I never got any drops there. Is there any way to test that specific share from Kodi (iperf for example, but not the average speed - I'd like to see if there were connection time-out). Please advise

    Thanks,

    • Official Post

    I have read that some hardware/software combinations can have SMB hiccups. Personally I've used NFS in my network for almost 10 years now running XBMC/OpenELEC/LibreELEC/Kodi, and I never had to create any buffer settings in the advancedsettings.xml file...

    Why SMB can be such a PITA, I don't know. But you could try NFS instead and see if that protocol works better for you.

    • Official Post

    I use SMB without issues for a decade (and deliberately, as it's the lowest-common-denominator among user installs) and I tend to rip original media with high quality settings so 40GB+ files are not uncommon. I have never fiddled with cache settings, because there is no need to if your network functions okay. NFS might work better for some - no harm in trying that. The network tools add-on includes iperf, but this is more designed for throughput than reliability testing so YMMV.

    No, that one is disabled. I was running constant ping from NAS to LE RPI4 while watching movie and looks this is something to do with network or cable length. I expect to see less then ms response for ping to directly connected devices. But it is ~3ms and every minute+ I'm seeing this spikes

    I'll try to connect it with short cable to the switch to see if this changes anything , as currently cable is around 25-30m long.

    But so far LE cannot see NFS shares I've configured. Will try to mount them within the box and then use internal folders for media.

    I will post update here but thank you anyway for you advices.

    Looks like it doesn't like long cable:

    Sun Jun 14 23:06:41 BST 2020: 7977 packets transmitted, 7856 packets received, 1.5% packet loss

    Sun Jun 14 23:06:41 BST 2020: round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 2.239/9.971/1967.057/61.806 ms

    vs short cable:

    Tue Jun 16 16:25:43 BST 2020: 9657 packets transmitted, 9657 packets received, 0.0% packet loss

    Tue Jun 16 16:25:43 BST 2020: round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 0.153/0.333/1.540/0.097 ms

    Will be looking for some premium-ultra-super-shielded cable to see if that brings back joy. Checked logs for playback of the same file that was freezing every 5-10 minutes: just normal log now ( first log entries when file opened - next log entries after 2h:04mins - that matches video length).

    I think topic can be closed. Thank you everyone who responded.