[plug] PS3, MediaTomb occasional freeze in video stream

[Daniel Pittman]

Lucas van Staden <lvs at dedmeet.com> writes:

> I use MediaTomb on an epia machine, running debian, as my media/file
> server to my PS3.  When watching divx video, the stream pauses every
> now and then, and I can't see any pattern, it seems random.

Hmmm.  I will be very interested to hear what the outcome of this is,
since I am considering ending up with a similar configuration — modulo a
much more powerful server, sitting further away. ;)

In general, are you happy with the system?

> The obvious move was to ssh to the box, and monitor it using top, to
> see if there is a process that takes up cpu resources, thus causing
> the pause.
>
> The only thing is, once I ssh in, and I run top, no pause (processor
> never drops below 70%) . So it would seem that running top solves the
> issue, but it is a silly resolution to solve the issue.

That is interesting.

> Any ideas? Possibly other ways to monitor system resources?

Well, I would try vmstat or dstat running detached on the machine,
probably under screen, so I could disconnect the ssh session.

That should give you nice monitoring, especially logged to a file,
without ssh peturbing things.  If it still makes things work you have
trouble. ;)

> I did set the hard drive not to sleep/spin down, but that has not
> solved the issue - still need top running.

Any kernel messages around the same time?

How about logs: is cron kicking off a background process?

> Oh yeah - the two are directly connected via a cross-over cable, on a
> gigabit connection, so I don't think it is a network issue (upgraded
> the network on the epia previously, as I thought that the 100mb
> network may have been the issue)

My guess would be not, but it might be worth checking for errors on the
interface or possibly a tcpdump.

Regards,
        Daniel