Performance with Network Drives

[thesoulpig]

I recently moved my media to a NAS and have been trying to get Subsonic setup with it. Unfortunately, the performance is abysmal. It takes far too long to read any music stored on the network drive. Playlists loading music from that drive take upwards of 5 minutes to load into the player. However, once a song or playlist is loaded in the player, it plays just fine. I've tested it with some music loaded on a local harddrive and it performs perfectly. It seems to only affect music on the NAS.

The testing has mostly been done in a browser on the computer running the server to eliminate network issues prior to the NAS. However, I've also tested on my Android phone and it's even worse. It just times out after 4 atempts to read the file most times.

The Subsonic server is set to run under an admin user. My NAS has a static ip on my network. I've tried setting up music folders using the UNC path, the mapped network drive (Subsonic didn't even seen any music this way), and a local directory I mklinked to the music folder on the NAS. All with the same results.

Environment info...

Version: 4.4 (build 2172) – February 6, 2011
Server: jetty-6.1.x, java 1.6.0_24, Windows 7 (29.6 MB / 37.1 MB)

Running on a laptop with Windows 7 Home Prem 64-bit.

Logs show:

Code: Select all

[4/30/11 10:37:31 PM CDT]   INFO   DaoHelper   Checking database schema.
[4/30/11 10:37:31 PM CDT]   INFO   DaoHelper   Done checking database schema.
[4/30/11 10:37:32 PM CDT]   INFO   SearchService   Automatic index creation scheduled to run every 1 day(s), starting at Sun May 01 03:00:00 CDT 2011
[4/30/11 10:37:32 PM CDT]   INFO   PodcastService   Automatic Podcast update scheduled to run every 24 hour(s), starting at Sat Apr 30 22:42:32 CDT 2011
[4/30/11 10:37:35 PM CDT]   INFO   NetworkService   Deleted port mapping for port 8080
[4/30/11 10:37:45 PM CDT]   INFO   VersionService   Resolved local Subsonic version to: 4.4
[4/30/11 10:37:45 PM CDT]   INFO   VersionService   Resolved latest Subsonic final version to: 4.4
[4/30/11 10:37:45 PM CDT]   INFO   VersionService   Resolved latest Subsonic beta version to: 4.4.beta1
[4/30/11 10:37:53 PM CDT]   INFO   MusicFolderDao   Deleted music folder with ID 2
[4/30/11 10:38:25 PM CDT]   INFO   MusicFolderDao   Created music folder d:\my music
[4/30/11 10:38:43 PM CDT]   INFO   MusicFolderDao   Deleted music folder with ID 3
[4/30/11 10:42:32 PM CDT]   INFO   PodcastService   Starting scheduled Podcast refresh.
[4/30/11 10:42:32 PM CDT]   INFO   PodcastService   Completed scheduled Podcast refresh.
[4/30/11 10:47:39 PM CDT]   INFO   MusicFolderDao   Created music folder z:\files\music
[4/30/11 10:48:12 PM CDT]   INFO   MusicFolderDao   Deleted music folder with ID 4
[4/30/11 10:55:43 PM CDT]   INFO   MusicFolderDao   Created music folder \\dlink-016e34\volume_1\files\music

Any help would be appreciated. I've made a donation to Subsonic as I got a lot of use out of it on my old setup, but I can't use it if it won't play nice with my NAS.

[GJ51]

This is not an uncommon problem. Using a NAS adds another layer and thus additional lag. If you make a request to a server running SS and the music is available locally, the server just responds to the request and ships the data out from the drive to the lan connection and back to the requestor. When you store the music on a NAS, the server has to first call the data from the NAS and then send it out over the same connection. Thus you've now doubled the traffic on the lan port on the server. If your using 10/100 lan and the drive is only capable of around 50 - 80 mbps transfer rate and your trying to get the data from the drive at the same time that SS is trying to send it to the requesting system ... it just adds a lot more activity than just sending the data directly from a local drive. Depending on the horsepower of the hardware involved, you can get reasonable results using a lan or a network share as the media source, but it will always involve more overhead than just serving up the data stored locally on the server. I'm not sure how much data is involved in your case, but if you're limited to a laptop for your SS you might consider a hard drive upgrade. 750GB - 1 TB 2.5" drives are available, but be sure to double check physical size if you go that route as some of the new 2.5" drives do not fit in all laptops.

I realize that everyone has different resources available and not all solutions are practical for all users, but my recommendation would be to setup a dedicated SS server. You can get really cheap refurbs for about $200 that can be the basis for a really great performing SS server. http://www.tigerdirect.com/email/WEM266 ... remail2664 is just one example.

I often get adds for barebones kits in this price range that would make great SS servers. They usually have cases that have room for adding hard drives for plenty of storage expandability. Once set up, you can remove the kybd, mouse, and monitor and just let it run headless. If you use WHS v1 as the OS you can also install lights out so that it will sleep when not in use. I usually try to look for systems/kits with low power cpu's, typically 65w - but they are getting harder to find.

HTH

[thesoulpig]

Thank you for trying to help, but that doesn't really explain what I'm seeing. Remember, I'm not making the request from a remote client. I'm seeing this on the machine running the Subsonic server (accessing the server via http://localhost:8080). Since my first post, I've noticed that this only happens when media is being loaded into the player. Once a playlist has populated it streams perfectly. And this only happens with Subsonic. Windows Media Player has absolutely no difficulty getting media from the NAS and the folders aren't even indexed.

If the issue was due to lag caused by the additional traffic needed to get to and from the NAS, why would this only affect the loading of data into the player and not the actual streaming of media?

[GJ51]

Did you give the SS service log on rights to the NAS?

[thesoulpig]

The NAS has no log on requirements outside of the admin panel.. I haven't implemented any user or account control on any of the volumes or folders at this point. Subsonic can read and write to the configured folders just fine aside from the lag loading into the player.

I did some timings and it's taking about 30 seconds to load a 100 song playlist. That stays consistent as the size of the playlist increases. A 500 song list took about 2:40. The times aren't as bad as they seemed last night, but still far longer than I would expect and still generating timeout errors on my Android device.

Reducing the data displayed in a playlist on the web player speeds things up (the 500 song list dropped to 1:40) but that's still a bit long to wait for the player to load and doesn't help the Android player at all.

I didn't think about it before, but the NAS holds two identical drives that are configured in a RAID 1 setup.

I just found this thread and reading it over now for more tips. Apparently, my experience isn't unique.

[GJ51]

I think that's probably on the right track. I've never had the problem as all my media is stored on Windows based servers. I do occasionally configure SS to access the media stored on a different server using UNC. Performance is generally very good and virtually indistinguishable from local access.

[gamezonline]

What NAS you have? the reason i asked because there are some Tutorials
on how to install subsonic on the NAS. that would fix the lag problem as Ive done that my self and don't have to leave the pc on anymore too.