[pashdown]

I have traditionally used ccxstream with my XBMC installed Xboxes. Since I'm upgrading to Linux HTPCs, I thought I'd run some network file system tests to determine what is most efficient at transferring files from my server.

To test each, I copied a 382MB movie off my server into /dev/null and timed the operation. In the case of ccxstream, I used ccxtest, which does a similar file copy into nothing. My network is 100Mb.

I also tried a variety of different options with nfs to see if I could increase performance. The differences were minor.

ccxstream 2:14.5
nfs -o rsize=8192,ro 35.7
nfs -o rsize=16384,ro 35.3
nfs -o rsize=8192,ro,mountproto=udp 35.8
nfs -o rsize=8192,ro,mountproto=tcp 35.4
cifs/samba rsize=16384 52.1

The clear winner here is nfs, at almost twice the speed of cifs/samba and four times the speed of ccxstream.

[bobb0]

I used to use ccx as well -- when I used an XBOX for XBMC, I found it was the simplest way to go. When I upgraded to XBMCLinux for HD, however, I found that HD content would suffer a long delay before starting and I could not fast forward/skip to different parts of the video without it failing and dropping back to the menu. All in all, very unstable. SMB does not appear to suffer this lag, that is what I am using now. NFS sounds great, but my storage raid runs on a windows box and I'm not sure how to set that up... SMB seems to do the trick for now... the only network bottleneck I suffer now is my wireless, but since I upgraded to 5GHz N, it's fast enough for all but the most bitrate-intense HD scenes. (I use Baraka 1080p as my test as it gets up to 30Mb/s in some scenes.)

[Hannes The Hun]

NFS clearly is the way to go for the future, but it would be great if handling of this protocol would become easier

[lixe]

I have XBMC installed on a Linux PC and I'm using SMB (from my MacBook) and all my HD movies suffer a long delay like bobb0 described using ccx...
I don't think it's a problem caused by XBMC or Linux because I have this issue since the beginning of using Linux and XBMC. I've used different Ubuntu versions and also of course different XBMC versions.
Does anybody have a clue whats wrong? It would be a lot easier to use SMB. I've tried UPnP and it works perfect but I can't scrape my movies then...
In case SMB doesn't work for me is there a NFS How-To? I never used NFS until now.

[pashdown]

Here is a very robust How-To. It should apply to OSX as well. Off the top of my head:

1. Edit /etc/exports on OSX to allow the mounting of whatever path you want.
2. Add the nfs-common package on your Ubuntu box.
3. Edit /etc/fstab on your Ubuntu box to mount the OSX box path.
4. Reboot.

The command "man exports" on OSX and "man fstab" on Ubuntu will also have more information and examples.