Running multiple clients has very jerky video despite very powerful PCs

[LehighBri]

I submitted this same question to the beta email but thought I'd ask this forum as well. I'm running the latest 6.5.8 beta on my server PC in my signature below. As you can see the specs are more than capable to handle a ton of clients, but for some reason, when I connect with both my HD200 AND another client PC (which has equivalent specs to the server), both video streams are very jerky. If I stop playback on one or the other, the remaining client is smooth as silk.

Any reason why when I hit 2 clients connected the video becomes very jerky? I monitored my servers resources when 2 clients are connected and CPU is <5%. Thoughts? Note that this has been happening to me with 6.5.8 and 6.5.7 (I didn't test this in other previous betas).

[reggie14]

Likely your limiting factor is your hard drive. In general, even relatively old hard drives can handle sequential reads and writes much faster than is necessary for Sage, but your reads and writes will not be very sequential. Pieces of recordings will be all over the drive. Plus, if you're watching live TV on two different extenders, you're really doing 2 reads and 2 writes at the same time on the drive. Still, a modern 7200RPM hard drive ought to be fast enough. What are the specs on your recordings hard drive?

Also, is your recording drive formatted to 64k blocks? That's pretty important.

[gplasky]

Originally Posted by LehighBri

I submitted this same question to the beta email but thought I'd ask this forum as well. I'm running the latest 6.5.8 beta on my server PC in my signature below. As you can see the specs are more than capable to handle a ton of clients, but for some reason, when I connect with both my HD200 AND another client PC (which has equivalent specs to the server), both video streams are very jerky. If I stop playback on one or the other, the remaining client is smooth as silk.

Any reason why when I hit 2 clients connected the video becomes very jerky? I monitored my servers resources when 2 clients are connected and CPU is <5%. Thoughts? Note that this has been happening to me with 6.5.8 and 6.5.7 (I didn't test this in other previous betas).

Originally Posted by reggie14

Likely your limiting factor is your hard drive. In general, even relatively old hard drives can handle sequential reads and writes much faster than is necessary for Sage, but your reads and writes will not be very sequential. Pieces of recordings will be all over the drive. Plus, if you're watching live TV on two different extenders, you're really doing 2 reads and 2 writes at the same time on the drive. Still, a modern 7200RPM hard drive ought to be fast enough. What are the specs on your recordings hard drive?

Also, is your recording drive formatted to 64k blocks? That's pretty important.

The 64K blocks are very important as reggie mentioned. Also you may want to disable the network throttling Vista is known to do. There is a reg setting that you need to change. Search the forums or google. If your issue is client performance as clients increase I would look at network and harddrive performance. Make sure you have yor directories shared and the proper permissions to access the media too. If it is incorrect there could be more overhead. I'm assuming all are on the same LAN and plugged into the same switch or router with switch ports?

Gerry

[LehighBri]

Originally Posted by reggie14

Likely your limiting factor is your hard drive. In general, even relatively old hard drives can handle sequential reads and writes much faster than is necessary for Sage, but your reads and writes will not be very sequential. Pieces of recordings will be all over the drive. Plus, if you're watching live TV on two different extenders, you're really doing 2 reads and 2 writes at the same time on the drive. Still, a modern 7200RPM hard drive ought to be fast enough. What are the specs on your recordings hard drive?

Also, is your recording drive formatted to 64k blocks? That's pretty important.

Yes, my recording drive is formatted with 64k blocks and it's practically a brand new hard drive (it's a 1.5TB 7200RPM SATA Seagate... I also patched the firmware with the firmware fix fixing issues with this specific drive). In looking at the resource monitor in Vista, the hard drive stats are below (w/ superfetch disabled):

1 client connected: 0-1MB/sec, 1% CPU
2 clients connected: 1MB/sec, 2% CPU

Finally, I remember reading around that Vista's Superfetch caused issues. I have that disabled and still getting issues.

[LehighBri]

Originally Posted by gplasky

The 64K blocks are very important as reggie mentioned. Also you may want to disable the network throttling Vista is known to do. There is a reg setting that you need to change. Search the forums or google. If your issue is client performance as clients increase I would look at network and harddrive performance. Make sure you have yor directories shared and the proper permissions to access the media too. If it is incorrect there could be more overhead. I'm assuming all are on the same LAN and plugged into the same switch or router with switch ports?

Gerry

My previous post has items related to the hard drive. I updated the stats with network performance data:
SD
1 client connected: server is at 0-1MB/sec hard drive, 1% CPU, 5-7Mbps network usage
2 clients connected: server is at 1MB/sec hard drive, 2% CPU, 5-8Mbps network usage (gets very choppy around 8Mbps)

Yes, all are on the same LAN using my WRT54G router which is using Tomato 1.23 firmware. Not sure how to check permissions on the folders... I haven't changed anything there. My server's network card is onboard network that came with my Dell PC (an Intel gigabit connection...speed and duplex set to auto negotiation). I agree, sounds like network I just don't know how to proceed!

UPDATE: I ran some tests against HD content and it's running very smoothly... it only gets jerky with SD!
1 client connected: server is at 2MB/sec hard drive, 2% CPU, 10-15Mbps network usage
2 clients connected: server is at 5MB/sec hard drive, 3% CPU, 25-30Mbps network usage

[reggie14]

Originally Posted by LehighBri

In looking at the resource monitor in Vista, the hard drive stats are below (w/ superfetch disabled):

1 client connected: 0-1MB/sec, 1% CPU
2 clients connected: 1MB/sec, 2% CPU

Finally, I remember reading around that Vista's Superfetch caused issues. I have that disabled and still getting issues.

Well, when two clients are connected and watching (different) HD recordings, you should be reading about 4-5 MB/sec off the hard drive, and if you're recording, another 4-5 MB/sec of writing to the hard drive. In any case, I really think that drive should be fast enough. I could imagine more problems as the drive fills up, and it has to work harder to find free blocks to save things to.

This probably isn't really an issue with a lack of resources (but, I do sort of wonder about the hard drive). You should have plenty of bandwidth on your network, but as gplasky pointed out, there are some networking-related issues to explore. I thought Vista SP1 was suppose to fix the throttling issues, but you can try disabling it. You might want to go into your device manager, find your network adapter, and try to disable any hardware offloading it might do (e.g., checksum offloading). I think that ends up under the advanced tab under an individual device's properties.

I doubt this would fix it, but you could try disabling UAC if you haven't already. I know it used to cause other problems in Sage, and still might, so it might be good to disable it anyway.

[reggie14]

Originally Posted by LehighBri

UPDATE: I ran some tests against HD content and it's running very smoothly... it only gets jerky with SD!
1 client connected: server is at 2MB/sec hard drive, 2% CPU, 10-15Mbps network usage
2 clients connected: server is at 5MB/sec hard drive, 3% CPU, 25-30Mbps network usage

OK, that sounds pretty strange. You're saying SD playback on 2 clients is jerky until you stop playback on one of your clients? But, HD playback on two clients is fine? Does this just happen with live TV or with previously recorded shows too? I'm wondering if this could possibly be related to your TV card.

[LehighBri]

Originally Posted by reggie14

OK, that sounds pretty strange. You're saying SD playback on 2 clients is jerky until you stop playback on one of your clients? But, HD playback on two clients is fine? Does this just happen with live TV or with previously recorded shows too? I'm wondering if this could possibly be related to your TV card.

I read about the registry item to modify throttling on Anandtech's site and modified the index below to 70... still didn't work.

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Multimedia\SystemProfile\NetworkThrottlingIndex

Then I tried turning off checksum offloading (there were many checksum offloading settings I disabled... some for ipv4, some for TCP, some for UDP). Nonetheless, they are all off now.

I have a HVR-2250 using the latest drivers from ftp://ftp.hauppauge.com/Support/HVR2250/. The next test will be testing playback of recorded SD and HD vs. how it performs live (e.g. to eliminate the HVR-2250 from the equation). Will post results shortly.

[reggie14]

Originally Posted by LehighBri

I have a HVR-2250 using the latest drivers from ftp://ftp.hauppauge.com/Support/HVR2250/. The next test will be testing playback of recorded SD and HD vs. how it performs live (e.g. to eliminate the HVR-2250 from the equation). Will post results shortly.

Just to clarify, maybe you should try playing back two previously recorded standard-def shows. Make sure when both of them were recording, they were the only thing recording at that time.

But, I'd be surprised if that's it. I think the HVR-2250 has two separate hardware mpeg2 encoders. It doesn't seem like it should matter if two things are recording at once.

[LehighBri]

What a saga. While I was waiting for my 2 SD recordings to finish, I tested a couple other scenarios:

-Playback of two 1080p MKV files (smooth playback when 2 clients connected). Network usage at around 20Mbps (perfectly fine).
-Playback of one SD live TV show while playing a DVD (480p stored in VIDEO_TS folder). Smooth playback when 2 clients connected). Network usage at around 16Mbps (perfectly fine).
-Playback of one SD live TV and one HD live TV. Smooth playback when 2 clients connected). Network usage at around 21Mbps (perfectly fine).

When I tested playback of two SD recordings (good idea reggie), works fine as well. So yes, sounds like there's something wrong when two clients try to both view live SD TV only (live HD TV works fine).

Any other thoughts on what I might be able to do there? Is this due to the fact that sage doesn't formally 100% support HVR-2250 yet? I'm guessing it's either an issue with Hauppauge's HVR-2250 drivers OR how Sage implemented Live TV support (if any) for the HVR-2250.

Thoughts Sage?

[redondo_se]

I had this problem when watching the Stealers Championship game a couple Sundays ago. I was trying playback the same HD stream from my HD-Homerun at the same time on 2 different PC clients. If both clients were at the live end of the stream, both would stutter horribly. If I backed the office client up about an hour behind live, both clients played fine.

Before you get too excited, I haven't had time to test if this solved my problem yet, but ...

After that I did a little digging and found out about using UNC mapped paths for recording directories. My server was setup to record everything to the local drives, and recording were not directly accessible over the network using those paths, e.g. C:\record_dir. From what I gather, with this setup the sagetvservice process has to stream everything to the clients. If you use UNC paths are accessible on the network, the client can access the files directly. I'm not sure if the HD200 can access files directly or not.

Do you use UNC or maped paths that are accessible on the network?

My server is pretty whimpy, it's an old AMD 3200+ single core running XP Pro 32-bit. I was just thinking about upgrading it because I've had some holes in recordings when a lot of stuff is going on and this playback chopiness. But, if you're having problems with a bad mutha server, I'm not sure it will help me. My network is all gigabit and my HDHR is directly connected to my server via a secondary network card, so those streams are not on my main network.

I'll try to find some time to test to see if I still have the stutter problem after changing to UNC paths.

Sean

[nyplayer]

Try the Demux and other file here I had the same problem even in 6.58... when I used those files everything played fine.
http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/show...&postcount=281

Originally Posted by LehighBri

What a saga. While I was waiting for my 2 SD recordings to finish, I tested a couple other scenarios:

-Playback of two 1080p MKV files (smooth playback when 2 clients connected). Network usage at around 20Mbps (perfectly fine).
-Playback of one SD live TV show while playing a DVD (480p stored in VIDEO_TS folder). Smooth playback when 2 clients connected). Network usage at around 16Mbps (perfectly fine).
-Playback of one SD live TV and one HD live TV. Smooth playback when 2 clients connected). Network usage at around 21Mbps (perfectly fine).

When I tested playback of two SD recordings (good idea reggie), works fine as well. So yes, sounds like there's something wrong when two clients try to both view live SD TV only (live HD TV works fine).

Any other thoughts on what I might be able to do there? Is this due to the fact that sage doesn't formally 100% support HVR-2250 yet? I'm guessing it's either an issue with Hauppauge's HVR-2250 drivers OR how Sage implemented Live TV support (if any) for the HVR-2250.

Thoughts Sage?

[LehighBri]

Originally Posted by redondo_se

Do you use UNC or maped paths that are accessible on the network?

I'll try to find some time to test to see if I still have the stutter problem after changing to UNC paths.

I do not use UNC or mapped paths. I will try that out as well and see what happens. Let me know how your testing goes.

Originally Posted by nyplayer

Try the Demux and other file here I had the same problem even in 6.58... when I used those files everything played fine.
http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/show...&postcount=281

Yep, I installed 6.5.8 then I copied over the latest demux and myasync file. Issue still exists both with and without the latest demux.

[redondo_se]

Originally Posted by LehighBri

I do not use UNC or mapped paths. I will try that out as well and see what happens. Let me know how your testing goes.

Be aware that you're old recordings will not use UNC paths unless you make them unaccesible from the previous directory, and then turn on a switch to make sage rebuild the recording database. I had to jump through hoops to make that happen:

• not sure if necessary if UNC paths actually point to local drives, but I made my sagetvservice run as a different user that has write permissions to unc paths
• change recording paths to UNC in sagetv interface
• shutdown and DISABLE sagetv service. you don't want it coming back up when you reboot
• change drive letters of drives where recordings are so they are no longer accessible using old path. Hopefully you don't record to C:, if you do I'm not sure how to help there.
• reboot server
• you have to remap your unc paths after changing drive letters, make sure permissions are good, etc.
• set the flag in the sage.properties file that forces sage to rebuild recording db paths, see the FAQ about moving recordings
• restart sage service
• when it's done rebuilding, shutdown service and remove flag from properties file
• after all this, you could change your drive letters back, but I just left them with their new letters

Sean

[LehighBri]

I get the whole rebuild of the library thing but I don't need to do that... I'll just delete all my old recordings (I don't have many... I know some of you have 100s .

I'm having trouble setting up the UNC path though. When I modify the video recording directory, I choose Network, then my Workgroup, then my PC name, the hour glass spin thing appears, then says Invalid directory. I confirmed on two PCs though that I am indeed sharing my SageTV Recordings directly so I'm not sure why Sage can't see them.

I also stopped the service and restarted it with using my Administrator user name, restarted and still no luck. Thoughts?

UPDATE: When I try to specify the path myself it says the directory does not exist do I want to create it. Something is off here.

[redondo_se]

I just typed the paths in by hand, then chose use current, or whatever it's called.

[LehighBri]

Turns out the UNC paths are case sensitive... when I browse for my PC through the network it has the name as all upper case yet that doesn't work (potential bug Sage?)

I typed in the name as all lowercase and the UNC works. Now I just need to get back to fixing the choppy video issue.

[LehighBri]

Update. I switched over to UNC paths and tried watching live TV again. Same jerky video issue is occurring so UNC paths did not fix that.

Is this due to the fact that sage doesn't formally 100% support HVR-2250 yet? I'm guessing it's either an issue with Hauppauge's HVR-2250 drivers OR how Sage implemented Live TV support (if any) for the HVR-2250.

[planetc]

Originally Posted by LehighBri

Update. I switched over to UNC paths and tried watching live TV again. Same jerky video issue is occurring so UNC paths did not fix that.

Is this due to the fact that sage doesn't formally 100% support HVR-2250 yet? I'm guessing it's either an issue with Hauppauge's HVR-2250 drivers OR how Sage implemented Live TV support (if any) for the HVR-2250.

Live TV is no different than Recorded, it works the same way. The only difference being there would be more going on at the server. The client wouldn't see any difference because it still writes to hard drive and then the client reads it.
I guess that would leave a driver issue/some kind of deep down arguement for resources going on in there when you try to run the capture card and read from the hard drive together.

[LehighBri]

Sage support has been working through this with me. Still not sure exactly what the deal is but here's a quick update.

The issue only really occurs when I'm recording 2 SD channels at once and then try to do something else with an SD file (either with one of the ones recording or playing a totally separate SD file back). In that case the playback is very jerky no matter what client is playing it back. HD playback works fine.

Example:
I record 2 SD channels at once on my HVR-2250, then playback a totally separate previosuly recorded SD file and it's jerky. Support then asked that I try playback of a file on a drive that is different from my TV recordings drive. So I played back a previously recorded SD file that I copied to my imported videos drive (H drive... my TV gets recorded to my T drive) and sure enough the SD file playback is jerky in Sage. I did the same thing with a HD file and it plays back smooth.

I then close the Sage client while it's still recording the 2 SD channels and play back the same SD file I copied to my H drive in WMP and it plays silky smooth. Clearly there's something wrong with Sage's playback mechanism as the same scenario but using playback via WMP works silky smooth.