HD300s have slowed to a crawl

[Chriscic]

All of a sudden both my HD300s have slowed to a molasses-like crawl on the interface, and when I try to play videos the interface looks like it's playing but video is just black.

Rebooting my server and switch seem to have had no effect. Sage client from PC works fine.

Any suggestions? Thanks.

[KryptoNyte]

Not sure if this is worthwhile, but have you powercycled both of the HD300 units (pulled the plug for a couple minutes)?

[stuckless]

Also check the network between your extenders and the servers... Something similar happened to me once and it turned out be a faulty port on my switch. packets where getting through, but there were lots of errors. After changing to a different port on the switch all was well.

[Chriscic]

Thanks for the replies guys. Upon light of morning I think I know what it is... the fan on my motherboard's Nvidia MCP chip, which had been making a nasty racket for some time, finally failed. I'm guessing that the chip subsequently either down-clocked or was fried, and that's causing the problems. I'm surprised the system otherwise seems to be functioning just fine; perhaps it's just a coincidence but I'm thinking that's the cause.

[KryptoNyte]

Could be. I will say that I have had many of those northbridge motherboard fans fail and I always replaced them with a large, fanless heat sync. To my knowledge, even with a dead fan, I don't believe I ever had one fail before I had a chance to repair it. I haven't purchased a motherboard with any moving parts now for over 7 years for this very reason.

I had the same exact thing happen, where my extender would slow to a crawl, only it was perfectly capable of playing video, it just tok forever to browse to it and get it playing. I shutdown the server, pulled the power plug on all extenders, restarted the server, and plugged the extenders back in. The menu movement lags were gone.

[Chriscic]

I'm a bit befuddled now as I figured I could still watch stuff in HD Theater mode. However, when I play from there I also get blackness no matter what the video file. And PC client continues to work perfectly. I can see this in terms of the interface lag issue, but both HD300 and PC clients should be decoding the video locally, so I don't understand why the HD300 can't play it properly even though the PC client can.

I already power-cycled the router, switch, server, and HD300, to no avail.

[KryptoNyte]

I assume your HD300's didn't always display this issue. What else has changed since they started doing this? Are you using any plugin's, like Gemstone, or some other STV's?

[stuckless]

I don't know if you've been following this other thread... related to UI lag on HD300... but Drewg's post, concisely explains the issue that I experienced some time ago (although until reading his post, I had no idea it was because I had upgraded my server/switch to to use gigabit )

I wonder if you are experiencing a similar issue with "pause" frames.

[Chriscic]

Thanks. I did see that thread.

Everything was working fine when I left for vacation, except for the noisy server fan. When I returned, problems and nothing different except failed fan. Had my current router and switch for three months and years, respectively. No firmware updates recently either.

Perhaps I will try a different (and non-gigabit) switch quickly to see if that makes any difference.

[Chriscic]

Running a Sage Server from my PC (albeit without all same the plug-ins) and the extenders work smoothly. So, I don't think it has to do with the network. Still thinking it's something with the Server PC. The fan failing must be more than a coincidence.

[drewg]

If you want to test the network, PM me & I'll give you the URL to download my netperf binaries. That way you can actually measure bandwidth between the sagetv server & clients.

Drew

[Chriscic]

I did a clean install of the Sage WHS server and now working fine. So who knows what was causing. Haven't reinstalled any plug-ins yet.

Thanks Drew for the offer, but I don't believe it was network.

[reggie14]

My HD300s have suddenly gotten really slow too. I'm not sure what's going on, but I am seeing constant traffic going to to on, but idling, HD300s. It's pretty high, too, ranging between 500 and 1000 kilobytes per second.

I'm not sure what the traffic is, either. I might have to install wireshark to try to figure out what's going on, but I doubt I'll be able to make heads or tails of the traffic.