[PlanetCCRMA] Re: Planet boxes as ogg client/server

[Mark Knecht]

Hi,
   A bit more info:

1) I forgot to mention that both sides are running Gnome by default
today. The server probably needs to be Gnome to suit my wife's needs.

2) I sat and watched a large file copy this morning as I dragged over
a few directories to listen to. There was one long period where the
copy process just stopped even though I could ping the machine and
wander around looking at its hard drive. It turns out my wife had just
started Sound Juicer to rip another CD. While the ripping was
occurring for long periods of time it appears that the system gave no
time to my network requests for file copies. I think this is likely to
be the issue.

   How do I optimize 2.6.10-2.1.ll.rhfc2.ccrma to favor networking and
hard drive usage and to deemphasize CDROM usage? I don't want to kill
either but I want network requests going to the hard drive for audio
to get through much more reliably.

Thanks,
Mark


On Tue, 1 Feb 2005 09:04:35 -0800, Mark Knecht <markknecht@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>    I wonder if anyone has tried to use their Planet boxes as ogg file
> servers and clients. We're trying to do this here but it's not working
> well enough to be useful as we're getting major dropouts on the audio.
> Logically I think this may be a networking problem but I'm not sure
> how to prove it. Here's the setup:
> 
> 1) My wife's FC2 machine 'dragonfly' has the ogg database. We've
> ripped a couple hundred CDs and they reside on her hard drive. The
> drive does about 45MB/S under hdparm.  She's running the following
> kernel:
> 
> [mark@dragonfly mark]$ uname -r
> 2.6.10-2.1.ll.rhfc2.ccrma
> 
> I've done no real configuration on her machine as she doesn't do audio
> today other than rip ogg files and listen to music. The long term
> intention is to tie this machine into the main stereo in our house
> through some sort of spdif connection so I had intended to worry about
> good performance when I did that as I'll have to install a second
> sound card.
> 
> 2) On her end we can play ogg files all day with no issues.
> 
> 3) I run Samba on her end and share the ogg file directory. I mount it
> from the command line on my end like this:
> 
> [root@Godzilla root]# mount -t smbfs -o username=mark
> //dragonfly/MusicLib /home/mark/music
> 
> [mark@Godzilla mark]$ df
> Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
> /dev/hda4              6759524   5625628    790524  88% /
> /dev/hda1                99043     19923     74006  22% /boot
> /dev/hda6              4032064   3246424    580816  85% /home
> none                    387652         0    387652   0% /dev/shm
> none                    387652         0    387652   0% /var/lib/jack/tmp
> //dragonfly/MusicLib  50394112  17705984  32688128  36% /home/mark/music
> 
> 4) At this point I attempt to play stuff from her machine using either
> alsaplayer or Aqualung. Both player work but both have major audio
> dropouts occurring. I've run the players using OSS emulation, straight
> Alsa interfaces and Jack. When using Jack (with or without real-time
> options) I've set latencies as high as just under 200mS but it doesn't
> matter. I get these long dropouts sometimes lasting as long as 20-30
> seconds. What's interesting to me is that I can ping her machine while
> the dropouts are happening and the delays are on the order of 1-5mS
> and are no worse than while the dropout are nt happening.
> 
> 5) There is no similar dropout problem when the same files reside on
> my studio machine so I assume the problem is dragonfly itself or the
> network but I'm open to any other ideas.
> 
> One interesting point is that eve when using Jack and being in the
> middle of a 20 second dropout I get no xruns.
> 
> 6) Her machine is a wireless connection and doesn't seem to have any
> problems connecting to the net. My machines are all hard wired.
> 
>    So, if I wanted to optimize her Planet box to be a networked file
> server with possibly some read ahead capabilities (is that possible?)
> what would I do?
> 
>    I'd possibly be OK with turning around the operation and putting
> some sort of broadcasting software on her machine, setting up the play
> list on her end and then pushing the audio data out as long as I can
> use my local D/A's on this end. That solution would require the
> ability to broadcast to multiple locations in the house though as we
> need to go to three different computers as well as the stereo, all
> possibly with different play lists. (That's slightly above 4Mb/S (for
> the 3 computers) and would probably be pushing wireless networking
> from dragonfly pretty hard if we went that far...)
> 
>    Still, I'd prefer to pull the data if possible.
> 
>    Any ideas how to solve this?
> 
> Thanks in advance,
> Mark
>