Browsing NAS folders on Android: 'a network error occurred'

[Andy L]

I'm running Subsonic 4.5 on my computer, where I have about 1.5 TB of live recordings in FLAC stored on a QNAP TS-409 NAS. I'm trying to browse through the folders on the NAS with my Android phone (HTC Desire) over wifi from a different location and finding that performance is very poor, whereas it seems to be fine when browsing/playing files on a local drive.

I have my folders on the NAS organised as such:
- Artist
- Artist\2001\2001-xx-xx
- Artist\2005\2005-xx-xx

The 2001 folder has only one subfolder (i.e. one show) and I have no problem browsing the folder and playing the FLAC files in it. However, the 2005 folder has 107 subfolders and browsing it only works very intermittently (maybe one in five attempts) - I get the message 'a network error occurred, retrying' before the Android client gives up after 4 retries.

Is there anything I can do about this? (I've setup up port forwarding etc. correctly and tried increasing the memory limit to 512 MB.) And if not, are there any plans to improve Subsonic's performance with NAS drives in future?

[BKKKPewsey]

I'm running Subsonic 4.5 on my computer,

Which is ?


If you search the forum you will find there are some discussions and fixes available about this problem
but it all depends on what SS is running on.

[Andy L]

Computer is an Intel Core 2 Duo E8400, 6 GB RAM, Gigabyte GA-EP45T-UD3LR motherboard, 2x 160 GB hard drives and 1x 750 GB hard drive running Windows 7 x64.

And I did search but couldn't find any solutions other than increasing the memory limit (which didn't help)...

[Billism]

I have the same or similar problem. I am running Subsonic 4.5 (build 2385) on a Core 2 Duo E8400, 2GB RAM, Windows 7 Ultimate (x86/32bit). In SS, I am using UNC paths to access music content on my FreeNAS server. In the Android app, I can browse most folders, but folders with many files take along time or it times out after retrying the 4 times. More often than not, it times out (after retying 4 times). Also, performing a search (ambiguous or specific) usually times out the same way. While performing a search, I looked at the server and right when I perform the search, the CPU usage immediately spikes to between 30% and 40% - taken by the subsonic-service.exe process - and for the duration of the search/retry process. Sometimes, the search actually works after the 2nd or 3rd network error retry; usually not though.

System memory is not even close to maxing out.

Anyone have a solution?

[gergo]

Hi All
I have absolutely the same issue here. I have searched over these forums and found no solution for this! I use a licensed version of subsonic 4.4 , running under Win XP. I kept my music files on an external hard drive before, and the Android client worked well. But now I keep them on a NAS networked drive and
- the web interface works slower --> that is ok
- but the Android client does not work! It can only display my main directory, if I browse into any subdir, it times out (like "network error occured, retrying..." , four times).
I would be happy to get some support
Thanks
Gergo

[rvsharpe]

Are you guys still experiencing a problem with slow NAS access when using the Android client? I was able to resolve the Android timeout issue with files stored on a NAS by creating an iSCSI target on the NAS and loading my music files on the target. Now I can search and browse with no issues. My apologies to all if this is a repeat of the solution.

[species8472jj]

I just posted a similar issue a couple weeks ago.

Here is the set up I had where I was experiencing the issues. I have a 3 TB NAS connected directly to the router, and I had subsonic loaded on a computer connected wirelessly to the router. With this configuration - I had the same issues you're experiencing.

I made a simple change, and it cleared things up. I have one machine connected ot the router, and I moved subsonic to that machine, so now subsonic is on a machine wired to the router.

Once I made that change, the performance improved dramatically.

I also saw another forum where you can install subsonic directly on your NAS.

http://forum.subsonic.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=20160#20160

I did not try this, but I wanted to share things I found to solve this problem.

Good Luck.