During Video playback freezing and network bitrate drops

[mm_half3]

Hello,

I've been running into a new (I think) issue on what has been a stable freeNAS system that's been running for almost 5 years. The current version of FreeNAS is 11.3-U5, and the hardware breakdown is:

- SUPERMICRO MBD-X10SL7-F-O Micro ATX Server Motherboard LGA 1150 Intel C222 DDR3 1600
- 16GB of Crucial DDR3 PC3-14900 memory
- 6x 4TB HGST SAS hdd, 6x 6TB HGST SATA disks
- 32GB SanDisk USB stick for freenas-boot device

I've been using this FreeNAS server to store the full bitrate mkv backups of my bluray and UHD collection. The mkv files are viewed using kodi based android media players (coreElec kodi-19.x, xdmc-18.x). Recently I've been noticing playback of the UHD/4K video files have been hitting glitches, where the video freezes for anywhere from a second to up to 15sec or more. When viewing the network report in the FreeNAS GUI, it shows significant drops in the TX bitrates when the freezing of video happens, from 70Mb/s when the video plays, sometimes dropping all the way to 0MB/s. I'm not sure when this started happening, but I just started noticing it during the last month or so. 1080P bluray files seem to work fine, but they run at much lower bitrates.

Been trying to troubleshoot this for a few weeks, without much luck. Below are the troubleshooting steps done:

- tested bandwidth available on the interface using iperf3 transferring about 1GB of data with the bitrate during the tests averaging about 940Mb/s
- swapped network cables and ports
- tested with a coreElec Kodi-19 based media player and two Zidoo X9s players using xdmc 18-x and HT app 2.x
- changed from igb0 to ibg1
- copied a few UHD/4k mkv video files glitching on the SuperMicro server to my second 5+ year stable freeNAS server: FreeNAS 11.2-U5 ASRock C2750D4I Mini ITX Server Motherboard FCBGA1283 DDR3 1600/1333 based with 32GB of Ram, then tested playback from the X9s and CoreElec kodi-19 based media players, and the UHD/4k playback was smooth without the same freezing.
- reviewed /var/log/messages, and the CPU/memory reports in the GUI for any issues, but don't see anything (other than repeated igb link state changes from up/down, repeat about 50-100 times per day, however, don't always happen when the video playback freezes. Note the ASRock FreeNAS server shows the same type of igb link state UP/Down log entries).


Not sure what else to do to figure out what the problem is with the SuperMicro FreeNAS device. I'm thinking maybe the onboard NIC adapter(s) have gotten flaky, but before buying a Pcie NIC wanted to see if there were trouble shooting steps I've missed. If the next logical step is to try a PCie NIC, any recommendations on what would be best for this MB? I've reviewed the rev2 version of the hardware guide and the Intel I210-AT chipset of the onboard NICs are listed as freeNAS compatible/recommended, should I look for a PCie 1210 NIC, or one of the others listed?

Thanks,

​

 

[Samuel Tai]

How full is your pool?

The path to success for block storage

It seems like I haven't written a sticky for awhile, but just in the last week I've had to cover this topic several times. ZFS does two different things very well. One is storage of large sequentially-written files, such as archives, logs, or data files, where the file does not have the middle...

www.truenas.com

You may be suffering from simple ZFS fragmentation, especially if your pool is nearing 80% full.

 

[mm_half3]

Hello Samuel,

12% fragmentation:

Code:

root@chromium:~/bin/scripts # zpool list media_NAS2


NAME         SIZE  ALLOC   FREE  CKPOINT  EXPANDSZ   FRAG    CAP  DEDUP  HEALTH  ALTROOT


media_NAS2  54.5T  38.9T  15.6T        -         -    12%    71%  1.00x  ONLINE  /mnt


root@chromium:~/bin/scripts # zfs list media_NAS2


NAME         USED  AVAIL  REFER  MOUNTPOINT


media_NAS2  25.9T  9.24T   472M  /mnt/media_NAS2

The datapool that the files do play back fine is well above 80% full, and has higher fragmentation listed (37%)

Thanks,