[plug] PS3, MediaTomb occasional freeze in video stream

[Lucas van Staden]

Just an update.

After disabling cron, and syslog-ng on the mediatomb server,  playback 
on the PS3 has been flawless.

Using the PS3 as a media frontend and mediatomb as the uPnP media server 
works like a charm.

-Lucas

Daniel Pittman wrote:
> 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
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