Random Pauses during Media Playback.

[seth]

 
Over the past couple of weeks, I have migrated my media storage, to my central core server. I am noticing now, random "freezes" while watching items that are now stored on the core.

My core is an hp Proliant ML300 G3 server. It has a pci gigabit ethernet adapter, broadcomm, and is attached to a Trendnet gigabit switch. I am thinking I may have a bottleneck in the server itself that is causing this random hiccup.

It is most noticeable while watching recorded shows, and then next noticeable while watching MythTV. My tuner cards are located in my Living Room MD, which uses gigabit ethernet to the core, I have watched the traffic using IPTraf application. My data streams are not being hindered by the network. As this server did not have a SATA interface for my drives, I added a SATA 1 card (150kbs) and plugged in my 2 SATA 7200 RPM drives. One is 80G and the other is 500G.

At first I suspected this card, as it is the slower SATA variant than the newer SATA cards. So I did a test, and remounted my MythTV storage drive on the 100G IDE drive that holds the OS, and MD Images. I still get the same pause during MythTV playback, and while watching the MythTV recordings. So that makes me look at the network again. But I get 1000MB Full Duplex on both the MD and the core according to ethtool. The MD is a dual core AMD x2 5000+ at 2.6GHz, the core is a dual core Xeon 2.8GHz. The core has 2.5G of ram and the MD has 2G of ram.

I guess I am not sure where to look here. I also have an external 500G WD MyBook, that when plugged into the USB1.1 jacks of the core, caused stuttering on occasion as well, albeit more regularly than the OnBoard storage, I took this drive and moved it up to the MD, and it plays back flawlessly.

I am guessing my bottleneck is on the core side of the house, and was wondering what logs to look at. Tail-ing /var/log/messages only show the constant mounting of media drives in the core, dmesg does complain quite a bit, ironically during the media pauses I am seeing, about CIFS mount errors Code -6. So which log should I be looking at to determine what is happening here?

Any guidance or inputs, as well as ideas are openly welcome. I have debated putting all the media drives on the MD and utilizing two of its 6 SATA 3 ports, to see if the issue persists.

Thanks and Regards,

Seth