Tips for Network Shares?

[booponix]

Hi,

I've been enjoying Subsonic for quite a long time, thanks for making it.

However, recently, I moved my library to a NAS device to give my family access without my computer being reliably available. Also, the library's gotten so large that I wanted to RAID it and get it off my internal drives.

Anyway, this has killed Subsonic. The NAS device is hanging off a gigabit ethernet switch. I can watch DVDs mounted directly from ISOs on the device. But Subsonic takes, probably, 30 (or more) seconds to load even the homepage.

I've tried updating the search index (doesn't seem to make any difference). For what it's worth, I can only access the network share with the UNC path (i.e., the mounted drive isn't visible, even if I run the service as me).

So, my question is... does anyone have any tips for speeding this up? Any idea why this would be so slow? It's just barely usable at this rate. This is Vista, and the library is probably 80GB or so. It's running on Tomcat, since I'd read that Jetty was slower. That also didn't make any difference.

Thanks!

[psych0munky]

I have experienced the whole UNC network drive slowness thing in a number of versions of windows. This is especially prevalent while running under service accounts and services. And yeah it is a "feature" in windows to not be able to map drives for services that are running.

I do have a couple of suggestions to try and help your trouble shoot, but first my assumptions:

- this NAS is using a windows file share of some sort, hence the UNC
- You are only storing the music and NOT the database on the NAS

Some things you can try to see if it is the fact that you are running as a service:
- What happens if you try to access the share from your normal windows session, WITHOUT mapping it to a drive (use the NET USE command to ensure that the drive is really disconnected and not cached)? Is it slow?
- Do you have a non-Vista machine you can try the same thing on?
- If neither of the above are slow to connect, then stop the service and run tomact manually after you have logged in to windows. Now hit the site...what are the results?
- Does your NAS use Samba for file sharing or something else? Can you even tell? If it runs Samba, can you tune the smb.conf file? Samba can be a real bear sometimes with connections...I have had to tune settings mercilessly, until I got it to work and haven't had to touch it.

I may think of some more, but that is all I can think of now.

[booponix]

Your assumptions are correct. This is a D-Link NAS box that shares via SMB (I understand it runs Linux under the hood, though I haven't been inspired to monkey with it at that level. I'd like to not break at least one electronic device in my home.)

I believe that, since Subsonic is on my local drive, the database is local.

So, as it turns out, I *can't* access the drive mounted-- seemingly no matter what I do. I can access it only with a UNC. That said, I tried unmounting the share for giggles, and it made no difference.

Also, running Tomcat myself (i.e. vs. a service) doesn't change anything, though I admit that I don't know if java apps under Vista have some sort of SUID thing happening to run as someone other than the current user.

See above about tweaking smb.conf. Since I haven't cracked the NAS box yet (and would really rather not) I'm going to put that one off for a late night, half-drunk, already lost all my poker chips, kind of session.

The only other thing I haven't tried-- but will-- is to install on something other than Vista and see what happens. I've got some Macs, Boxen, and XP machines here. I'll try it on some of those and report back.

[booponix]

OK, just to follow up... I installed the stand-alone package on my MacBook Pro (10.5.6)... very interesting, indeed. Performance via wireless (N) network is probably 10X better than the Vista machine that's hard-wired to the NAS via gigabit ethernet. It's still slower than if I ran it locally (i.e., to a local drive) but it's definitely usable at this rate.

Still, given that I have an almost-always-on, 3+GHz, dual-core, multi-gig of RAM Vista machine hard-wired to the NAS via Gbit ethernet... I'm a bit perplexed at this lousy performance.

So, I'd be very interested if anyone has any other ideas to try with Vista.

[mistaox]

Most NAS devices use SAMBA.
Samba is the Unix answer to Windows File Sharing.
Samba is slow when communicating with a Windows client, at least 20 % slower than a PC to PC share.
There is no such limitation when communicating with an Unix based OS like OSX.

So if you want to use the NAS, Install Subsonic on a MAC, like you did. Or install it on a machine running Ubuntu or the like.

[booponix]

Oy... that's classic.

Not to state the obvious, but do you suppose there's maybe a few million people out there with maybe a couple Windows boxes, a consumer-grade NAS box, and nothing else?

I don't know how many Fedora, Ubuntu, Mac, and Windows boxes I have. I'd guess I've programmed/configured/backed-up/upgraded/optimized more machines than you'll see in the next 10 years...

Still, it seems to me that telling people that a Java app has to run on a given platform to be functional is kind of... remarkably purpose-defeating? Ludicrous, even?

I swear, the next RTFM I get from some doofus kid who just learned to chain command line commands and thinks he's Matthew Broderick in War Games... is going to put me over the edge.

Most NAS devices use SAMBA.
Samba is the Unix answer to Windows File Sharing.
Samba is slow when communicating with a Windows client, at least 20 % slower than a PC to PC share.
There is no such limitation when communicating with an Unix based OS like OSX.

So if you want to use the NAS, Install Subsonic on a MAC, like you did. Or install it on a machine running Ubuntu or the like.

[mistaox]

I swear, the next RTFM I get from some doofus kid who just learned to chain command line commands and thinks he's Matthew Broderick in War Games... is going to put me over the edge.

Well if that's all it takes, might I direct you to a bridge in Brooklyn?? lol




Hey...I didn't mean to come off in a "RTFM" kind of way.
My reply was not based on any assumption as to your level of knowledge or experience, rather on my own personal experiences:

Anything UNIX + anything Windows = Oil + Water
You might be able to mix the two...but only after some vigorous stirring...try a blender even.

Java has nothing to do with it...well...perhaps it does...As I had no issue accessing files directly on the NAS when not using subsonic. Though I did notice that the NAS seemed to throttle down my bandwidth. Then again, there is no doubt a substantial amount of file buffering that takes place when accessing a file using this method.

When I first started using Subsonic I envisioned a Windows based web server and a Linux based Nas solution...Secure and user friendly..right??

NOPE!

I built my own NAS using Freenas and a custom XP iso using Nlite for the Web server.

I was using a small 100Mbps network at the time.
No matter what I tried, the throughput on the NAS, could never climb beyond 60mbs/Sec, up or down. This was based on the NAS's own internal bandwidth graphs.

Thinking that Freenas was to blame, I tried OpenFiler..No Change
I then tried Ubuntu as the file sever...no change.
I then tried SUSE..no change

The moment I moved the web server to Ubuntu...it was all good.
It would seem that windows was the problem..right?...not so fast.
I decided to host both the media files and subsonic on separate Windows boxes. The result was the same! The performance was what it was supposed to be....the conclusion??...SAMBA sucks...

Well, it doesn't suck....Its just not good in a mixed environment....how ironic.

So in my mind, for best performance, keep subsonic and its media on the same platform.

Sincerely,

"Doofus kid"

[booponix]

No, no, you're right... that was uncalled for. I was a little cranky when I wrote that.

I did, in fact, understand your point. Mine was just that it seems that "move to a different platform" is sort of a last resort kind of answer-- particularly for a Java app.

I never did figure out any way to speed the whole thing up, for what it's worth. Instead, I almost had to go the "the air is stinky in your house? move to a different house!" route. I stuck a larger drive in my machine, and now I mirror the library to the NAS box at night. It's incremental, so it doesn't take too long, and at least I have a back up if TSHTF.

I'd still be very interested in any ideas for getting the app on Vista to play nice with the NAS box.

[kdid]

http://forum.subsonic.org/forum/viewtop ... highlight=

In the above link I mention this same problem. It looks like Subsonic could make your problem go away if it implemented better caching of the artist list.

Something I did not mention in the above post is that it looks like Subsonic only is compiling the Artist list on request when a user logs on. If Subsonic did do it at startup and maintained synchronized artist lists for each music folder that you have in Subsonic, then I doubt you would notice much difference between a Subsonic having the files on a NAS and a Subsonic having the files on the same machine.

That said. I love my Subsonic.

[robotanalysis]

Hi,

I've been enjoying Subsonic for quite a long time, thanks for making it.

However, recently, I moved my library to a NAS device to give my family access without my computer being reliably available. Also, the library's gotten so large that I wanted to RAID it and get it off my internal drives.

Anyway, this has killed Subsonic. The NAS device is hanging off a gigabit ethernet switch. I can watch DVDs mounted directly from ISOs on the device. But Subsonic takes, probably, 30 (or more) seconds to load even the homepage.

I've tried updating the search index (doesn't seem to make any difference). For what it's worth, I can only access the network share with the UNC path (i.e., the mounted drive isn't visible, even if I run the service as me).

So, my question is... does anyone have any tips for speeding this up? Any idea why this would be so slow? It's just barely usable at this rate. This is Vista, and the library is probably 80GB or so. It's running on Tomcat, since I'd read that Jetty was slower. That also didn't make any difference.

Thanks!

Thought I would reply to this older post since I may have some useful information.

I recently experienced the same problem you described after moving my music library to a NAS. However, I'm not running Vista - here's my setup:

*Iomega StorCenter ix2-200 (2x1TB)
*Windows Server 2008 (running on a laptop at home)
*~100GB music library

At first, when I mounted the network share on my Windows server, I was really disappointed in the speed it took to load folders in Subsonic. My music collection is sorted into genres, by folder. For a folder which had ~10 folders enclosed, it was taking ~30 seconds to load up all the folders inside. (I would click on my Japanese folder, and 30 seconds later I would see the 10 folders of Japanese artists.)

However, once I created an ISCSI share on the NAS and mounted it on the server, Subsonic was nearly back to normal speeds. I don't believe any non-server versions of Windows have an ISCSI option, but it worked for me - same physical setup, different protocol.

[tguless]

Unfortunately I only have Samba option on this NAS and I can't serve music off it without having to put up with horrible performance when browsing folders. There has to be a way to at least cache the file structure, or change a Samba setting to make the speed more tolerable.

[hawaii2000]

I just discovered this myself when I decided to move a local (to the Subsonic server) usb drive to another computer on the network and share it. The Web UI becomes completely unusable as it takes forever to refresh frames and pages. Oddly enough, once it starts streaming/playing, it's fine. For now, I'll just move it back and make the drive local again. In the meantime, it's really too bad I can't have my music on a shared network drive.

[armedmonkey]

How are you even getting subsonic to see stuff on your network share? Even my little insecure home network requires me to enter a password (or have the same username/pass as the owner of the share) to view it, and subsonic doesn't have any place to enter such credentials!

[paradym3]

Curious if you were able to work this out? I found this thread while I was getting my new server setup, and needed to use a network drive. A solution I found is iSCSI. Not sure about the performance yet as I am just getting things up and running. I will report back when I have some additional details. For the record I am running the free version of KernSafe iStorage server. The free version only allows 1 connection which is fine for me. A Windows 7 machine is acting as the target and Windows Server 2008 R2 is connecting. My collection is 21K songs or about 160 Gigs. Connection is over Giga ethernet. Using an iSCSI disk is crucial for my application as Im running Tomcat and could not add files from a network drive, but the ISCSI drive appears as local.
Hope this helps if your still having an issue.

Craig

[mhausig]

I wonder if this is what is wrong with my system. I'm running subsonic on a Win7 comp but have my music on a NAS drive. Navigation is very slow and loading up a playlist can take 20-30 minutes. I upped the memory allocated to the server but it didn't help at all.