[mythtv-users] Performance Issues with Network Drive

[C.T. Paterson]

Hey folks,

Wondering if anyone could supply any insight...

I have a Mythbuntu 8.10 BE/FE box sitting in my entertainment unit.
The OS runs off of a USB stick (high temp was killing internal
drives), and all the media is actually on a pair of SATA drives in a
DNS-323 NAS.

The myth box and the NAS share a GigE connection.  The drives are
mounted on the myth box using cifs.  To illustrate completely,
watching live TV consists of the tuner card in the myth writing data
to the mounted drive (the NAS), and then reading the data back from
that drive, and putting it out to the TV.

- I get the occasional hiccup on playing back an mpeg4 or avi file (my
compressed videos)

- I can almost never change the channel without encountering a timeout
that puts me back at the main menu.  Sometimes it will even crap out
when I'm just watching live TV.

- I never really see any problems with the files I've recorded.

I have some torrents that run on this machine - but even if we grant
that my paltry <5 Mbps is hogging up the gige, I can confirm that the
problem persists even when torrents have been shut down.


Now, I did some math - and had convinced myself that this setup would
not be an issue.  I reasoned that two recording streams going down to
the NAS (I have a dual tuner cap card), plus reading a previous
recording would still leave plenty of room in the pipe.  Three
simultaneous mpeg2 streams was about the heaviest I could imagine it
all being.  Nonetheless, I seem to be getting significant performance
issues, but I can't explain why.

Soloutions sought, theories welcome, suggestions/ideas gratefully accepted.

Cheers.

-- 
"My country is the world, and my religion is to do good."
                                        -- Thomas Paine