[CheechWizz]

Hi,

I've been having alot of problems with my xbmc setup lately. It worked fine for a couple of months but all of the sudden I'm having alot of problems with anything done over my network.
I'm running XBMC live 9.10 rc2 on a Point of View Atom N330 ION with wired network. XBMC is installed on a 8gig USB stick.
My media sits on a CH3SNAS NAS (basically a rebranded Dlink DNS 323) and there's also a windows 7 machine on the same network and a couple of laptops that connect to the network from time to time.
All computers can browse and stream video/audio from the NAS without any problems, except for my XBMC machine. Sometimes it gives my a timeout when I browse to a folder on the NAS and sometimes it just stops while playing a movie and other times I can watch a complete movie without a problem.

I used to have a linksys router but I recently replaced that with a netgear wndr3700. It all worked fine untill a couple of weeks ago when I started getting Network timeouts all the time.

I searched the forums extensively and tried everything I could find.
So I started with increasing the network timeout setting in advancedsettings.xml which worked for a day or so untill the timeouts came back. I also tried mounting the samba shares in fstab which worked in the terminal but the mapped drives didnt show up when I tried to browse for them in XBMC. I've tried disabling DHCP and setting a static IP address, which didn't work either. I tried replacing the network cables and I've tried connecting using Upnp (the NAS has upnp functionality) but it gave me the same problems as with samba.

So then I upgraded my 9.04 to rc2 hoping that would help, but the problems are still there.
Now I'm not sure this is a XBMC problem and not a network problem but I don't know where else to go with this. This problem is really driving me nuts and I really hope anybody has an idea on what to do next.

I've put my log files up here: http://pastebin.com/m1e1e7aa2

[gsgleason]

A common cause of network slowness is improper speed/duplex. please post output of ifconfig and ethtool ethX where ethX is your lan interface. Must be root or sudo.

[Hannes The Hun]

as you're running 9.10RC2 live from a USB stick, have you already tried 9.11 live final to see if your network speed problems are still there?
if it works, you can do an export/import of your library and continue using camelot.

[CheechWizz]

Thanks for the replies guys.

@Hannes The Hun: Sorry about that, I meant 9.11 rc2 not 9.10 rc2..

@gsgleason:
I ran ethtool eth0 and that gave me this output: http://pastebin.com/m440ffc42
Running ifconfig returned the following: http://pastebin.com/m2476dcfb
Does that tell you anything?

[gsgleason]

Thanks for the replies guys.

@Hannes The Hun: Sorry about that, I meant 9.11 rc2 not 9.10 rc2..

@gsgleason:
I ran ethtool eth0 and that gave me this output: http://pastebin.com/m440ffc42
Running ifconfig returned the following: http://pastebin.com/m2476dcfb
Does that tell you anything?

Well, it's negotiating 1000/full which is good, but there are errors as shown in ifconfig. This appears to be shortly after bringing the system up because of the small amount of tx/rx bytes at that time. I think it would be beneficial to see the ifconfig (for the error counters) after attempting to stream something off your LAN, and look at the ifconfig error counters again.

Physical errors are always the first thing to eliminate, and ifconfig will show them, but these are only between your network card and whatever it connects to (router with built-in switch), so there are more pieces to this puzzle.

Does the NAS have interface statistics to view as well?

[CheechWizz]

I've tried finding any logs on my NAS but there don't seem to be any.
Anyway I tried opening a file on my NAS again to print out ifconfig when it timed out. It didn't really timeout this time instead it just hung up my system, after a good 30 minutes it still hadn't come up with a network timeout error message. I could still get to a command prompt by pressing ctrl-alt-2 but trying to log in with putty did give me a network error connection timeout error. When I looked in my router's admin pages the xbmc machine was gone from my attached devices list.

So I ran ifconfig from the prompt on my XBMC machine which returned (among other things).
eth0:
RX packets: 12016 errors: 32 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:32

The TX packets line reported no dropped packets, no errors:
TX packets: 7529 errors:0 droppped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000

I'm not sure what other lines of the ifconfig printout are useful and which are not, but you were right that the number of errors increases.
So atleast I now know the problem is with my network instead of my XBMC machine right?

[CheechWizz]

I think I made some progress here.
In the ifconfig printout I noticed a MTU of 1500 and while I was looking through the admin pages of my NAS I noticed that jumbo frames with an MTU of 9000 were enabled.
So I disabled jumbo frames and now I'm playing a 720p movie without any problems. I'm still not entirely sure it won't stop somewhere half way but for now its working..

I'm a networking noob but from the wikipedia entry it seems a high MTU on a slow device can cause lag and latency so it seems like the root of my problem.

[gsgleason]

I think I made some progress here.
In the ifconfig printout I noticed a MTU of 1500 and while I was looking through the admin pages of my NAS I noticed that jumbo frames with an MTU of 9000 were enabled.
So I disabled jumbo frames and now I'm playing a 720p movie without any problems. I'm still not entirely sure it won't stop somewhere half way but for now its working..

I'm a networking noob but from the wikipedia entry it seems a high MTU on a slow device can cause lag and latency so it seems like the root of my problem.

That is very odd indeed. Normally the maximum ethernet frame size is 1518 or 1522 with vlan tagging. I've never heard of such a thing. That actually violates the IEEE 802.x standards, so there is no wonder that it didn't work.

I'm glad you figured that out. I'm sure it will continue to work for you. Good eyes noticing the MTU.

[CheechWizz]

I does indeed looks like switching off the jumbo frames worked, I tested with both 720p and 1080p mkv's and after an hour or so I still havent gotten any freezes. Thanks so much for the help gsgleason, without the ifconfig I would've never found the problem!