Spinning circle when FF or RWD on client only

[m1abrams]

So I recently setup a new client machine, an Intel NUC device. Previously I had been using an HD300. Everything seems to be working on the new client however I get one weird behavior. After watching a show for a few minutes (up to first com break) when I hit short skip I get a 5-10sec spinning circle before to actually skips however every skip attempt made within a short period of time of that first one is fine with no delay, but then by the next com. break it will have the initial delay again.

Note my HD300 does not exhibit this behavior, even in the same location to eliminate any issue with the network connection at that location.

I have upped the maxheap to 1024 on both client and server.

[BobPhoenix]

Originally Posted by m1abrams

So I recently setup a new client machine, an Intel NUC device. Previously I had been using an HD300. Everything seems to be working on the new client however I get one weird behavior. After watching a show for a few minutes (up to first com break) when I hit short skip I get a 5-10sec spinning circle before to actually skips however every skip attempt made within a short period of time of that first one is fine with no delay, but then by the next com. break it will have the initial delay again.

Note my HD300 does not exhibit this behavior, even in the same location to eliminate any issue with the network connection at that location.

I have upped the maxheap to 1024 on both client and server.

I posted about this several months ago in another thread when posting a replying. I've noticed this for a year or so now. I switched from extenders only when SageTV was bought to all clients. Initially I was very happy to get much faster response times to what I was getting on my extenders. But then I started to notice this - may have been there all along and I just didn't notice it right away. When I was extenders only I didn't notice this exact behavior but the overall response seemed slower than a PC client so I was happy to switch to PC clients. Now it is annoying and may cause me to try alternate playback means like XBMC/Plex and only use SageTV to record.

So you are not alone.

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by m1abrams

So I recently setup a new client machine, an Intel NUC device. Previously I had been using an HD300. Everything seems to be working on the new client however I get one weird behavior. After watching a show for a few minutes (up to first com break) when I hit short skip I get a 5-10sec spinning circle before to actually skips however every skip attempt made within a short period of time of that first one is fine with no delay, but then by the next com. break it will have the initial delay again.

Note my HD300 does not exhibit this behavior, even in the same location to eliminate any issue with the network connection at that location.

I have upped the maxheap to 1024 on both client and server.

Could this be related?

http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=61266

(ie, ms security essentials, or some other realtime virus scanner)

[BobPhoenix]

Originally Posted by stuckless

Could this be related?

http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=61266

(ie, ms security essentials, or some other realtime virus scanner)

In my case I don't use any virus scanners on my server or playback clients. The only antivirus in the house is on my laptop and a browsing VM. The servers probably need about 2 years of updates from Microsoft because I turn off auto update as one of the first things I do when I installed the OS. I will check the dropped packets when I get home tonight but when I first checked I wasn't getting any when the spinning circles appeared. My copy speed for media files (4+GB) was the normal 35-45MB/s to my unRAID array (normal for the type of parity protected array that unRAID provides). So don't think it was a network problem. All of my SageTV servers and clients are Windows 7 x64 instances. One of the things I wish I could do is switch to Linux based SageTV servers as a test.

[m1abrams]

I also do not have any virus scanner on my playback or server since these are dedicated machines to the task the need for a virus scanner is very low.

I will check for dropped packets as well, I know I did have a faulty switch awhile back but have since replaced it.

FYI - My setup is a little different than most in that my server is running on a VM on ESXi. Note though it is a pretty beefy setup with dual intel E5-2640 chips and 96GB of ram on the host, I reserve 2000GHz and 8GB RAM to the SageTV server which is probably overkill. My storage server is OmniOS with ZFS that has 32GB RAM with 14 2 TB drives that are stripped and mirrored with one hot spare. The read speed to the recording drive which is using iSCSI to the ZFS share is ~400MB/s and my write speed is ~200MB/s, so I doubt drive read or write speed would be of any issue (note those are MegaBYTE numbers not megabit and these tests where from the SageTV server).

[patja]

Just posted on the current "spinning circle" thread that I've seen this problem happen when there are thousands of files in the recorded tv folder. In my case they were old orphaned comskip temp files.

I have a pretty analogous setup to yours with Sage in a VM on ESXI, the sage VM being hosted off a ZFS datastore in a separate VM (napp-it)

[m1abrams]

Originally Posted by patja

Just posted on the current "spinning circle" thread that I've seen this problem happen when there are thousands of files in the recorded tv folder. In my case they were old orphaned comskip temp files.

I have a pretty analogous setup to yours with Sage in a VM on ESXI, the sage VM being hosted off a ZFS datastore in a separate VM (napp-it)

Interesting, cause I have noticed that the comskip process does not clean up the orphaned files automatically and I have to remember to do this from time to time. I also probably have not done this in a bit.

[BobPhoenix]

Not sure what I'm really seeing but here is the netstat output on Windows server:

C:\>netstat -e -s -t
Interface Statistics

                           Received            Sent

Bytes                    2622902910      1192577087
Unicast packets           581080759       489212671
Non-unicast packets        11924691          408165
Discards                          0               0
Errors                            0               1
Unknown protocols                 0

IPv4 Statistics

  Packets Received                   = 152792123
  Received Header Errors             = 0
  Received Address Errors            = 32
  Datagrams Forwarded                = 0
  Unknown Protocols Received         = 0
  Received Packets Discarded         = 592388
  Received Packets Delivered         = 152326524
  Output Requests                    = 138661351
  Routing Discards                   = 0
  Discarded Output Packets           = 129
  Output Packet No Route             = 0
  Reassembly Required                = 35
  Reassembly Successful              = 17
  Reassembly Failures                = 0
  Datagrams Successfully Fragmented  = 0
  Datagrams Failing Fragmentation    = 0
  Fragments Created                  = 0

IPv6 Statistics

  Packets Received                   = 44292639
  Received Header Errors             = 0
  Received Address Errors            = 0
  Datagrams Forwarded                = 0
  Unknown Protocols Received         = 0
  Received Packets Discarded         = 18810
  Received Packets Delivered         = 44308706
  Output Requests                    = 24507197
  Routing Discards                   = 0
  Discarded Output Packets           = 55
  Output Packet No Route             = 2
  Reassembly Required                = 0
  Reassembly Successful              = 0
  Reassembly Failures                = 0
  Datagrams Successfully Fragmented  = 0
  Datagrams Failing Fragmentation    = 0
  Fragments Created                  = 0

ICMPv4 Statistics

                            Received    Sent
  Messages                  398         98
  Errors                    0           0
  Destination Unreachable   396         94
  Time Exceeded             0           0
  Parameter Problems        0           0
  Source Quenches           0           0
  Redirects                 0           0
  Echo Replies              2           0
  Echos                     0           4
  Timestamps                0           0
  Timestamp Replies         0           0
  Address Masks             0           0
  Address Mask Replies      0           0
  Router Solicitations      0           0
  Router Advertisements     0           0

ICMPv6 Statistics

                            Received    Sent
  Messages                  4613        4737
  Errors                    0           0
  Destination Unreachable   29          51
  Packet Too Big            0           0
  Time Exceeded             0           0
  Parameter Problems        0           0
  Echos                     0           0
  Echo Replies              0           0
  MLD Queries               0           0
  MLD Reports               0           0
  MLD Dones                 0           0
  Router Solicitations      0           12
  Router Advertisements     4           0
  Neighbor Solicitations    1639        3035
  Neighbor Advertisements   2941        1639
  Redirects                 0           0
  Router Renumberings       0           0

TCP Statistics for IPv4

  Active Opens                        = 11920
  Passive Opens                       = 4951
  Failed Connection Attempts          = 332
  Reset Connections                   = 12304
  Current Connections                 = 10
  Segments Received                   = 149414387
  Segments Sent                       = 171760065
  Segments Retransmitted              = 1142

TCP Statistics for IPv6

  Active Opens                        = 4089
  Passive Opens                       = 4226
  Failed Connection Attempts          = 0
  Reset Connections                   = 8312
  Current Connections                 = 3
  Segments Received                   = 301047053
  Segments Sent                       = 535754021
  Segments Retransmitted              = 4114

UDP Statistics for IPv4

  Datagrams Received    = 2775527
  No Ports              = 531007
  Receive Errors        = 61029
  Datagrams Sent        = 379737

UDP Statistics for IPv6

  Datagrams Received    = 100440
  No Ports              = 18796
  Receive Errors        = 1
  Datagrams Sent        = 74795

Seem to get normal speeds on file transfers so I don't think it is too bad.

[m1abrams]

Those stats look fine. 1 sent error out of that many packets is no issue.

I cleaned up my recording directory of orphaned files which removed ~1500 files. That brought the number of file in that directory down to 1200. However I did not see much improvement.

I am wondering if I should break up my recording directory into multiple directories to see if that helps with the issue.

[patja]

I just checked and I currently have 5,600 files in my recorded tv folder and it is working fine. Maybe I mis-remembered and hit problems at more like 8,000 - 15,000 files

[BobPhoenix]

Originally Posted by m1abrams

Those stats look fine. 1 sent error out of that many packets is no issue.

That's what I figured but I thought I might be miss-reading it. Thanks.

Originally Posted by m1abrams

I cleaned up my recording directory of orphaned files which removed ~1500 files. That brought the number of file in that directory down to 1200. However I did not see much improvement.

I am wondering if I should break up my recording directory into multiple directories to see if that helps with the issue.

I've been thinking about doing that as well. I can say however splitting files out to sub-directories off the main SageTV import folder hasn't helped me.

For instance I have the following structure:
\\N40L\MediaCenter\A Gifted Man - files for series "A Gifted Man"
\\N40L\MediaCenter\Castle - files for series "Castle"
\\N40L\MediaCenter\Movies - files for recorded movies.
etc.

Where the import folder in SageTV is \\N40L\MediaCenter

The next thing I was going to try was something like the following:
Import directories:
\\N40L\MediaCenter\MoviesA-B
\\N40L\MediaCenter\MoviesC-D
...
\\N40L\MediaCenter\SeriesA-B
\\N40L\MediaCenter\SeriesC-D

If that doesn't work then I will have to try something like Plex/XBMC for playback and not use SageTV clients anymore. Then just periodically use a placeshifter to make sure the scheduling is working like I want.

[nettech_gt]

Originally Posted by m1abrams

So I recently setup a new client machine, an Intel NUC device. Previously I had been using an HD300. Everything seems to be working on the new client however I get one weird behavior. After watching a show for a few minutes (up to first com break) when I hit short skip I get a 5-10sec spinning circle before to actually skips however every skip attempt made within a short period of time of that first one is fine with no delay, but then by the next com. break it will have the initial delay again.

Note my HD300 does not exhibit this behavior, even in the same location to eliminate any issue with the network connection at that location.

I have upped the maxheap to 1024 on both client and server.

I'm having the same issue. I was using a HD100 but now have a Brix. After watching a show for 3-4 minutes whether I press the skip button on the remote or I let comskip skip I get the spinning circle for about 5-7 seconds before it actually skips. Any skips after that skip instantly with no spinning circle... Until I watch for at least another 3-4 minutes then the spinning circle again on the first skip... I too have my Java Heap set to 1024 on the client and server. My HD100 dose not have this issue when plugged into the same port as the client.

[m1abrams]

I have never been able to solve this issue. I suspect this is an issue with the client app and as such probably never fixed. I have both an HD200 and HD300 that do not suffer this problem.

[nettech_gt]

Out of curiosity what audio/video filters are you using on your client?

[m1abrams]

AC3Filter and FFDshow

[mikejaner]

I wanted to resurrect this because I am seeing the same thing, after transitioning from an HD300 on a TV to a client PC.
The difference between what you guys were saying and my self is I don't have thousands of files in my recording directory. Maybe a few dozen. I also don't have the Comskip stuff installed right now.
Anyways to reiterate, I start a show, and FF and REW work perfectly. I watch for a few minutes, then hit FF or REW, I see the spinning circle for 5 seconds or so, then I can FF or REW with no issues. I thought it sounded like a hard drive spinning down on either the client or server, but I checked, and both are set to never spin down.

I wonder if Narflex has any idea what this could be?