Question about speeds reading from NAS
#1
Hi - I have a general question or two about XBMC's capabilities with regard to playing local content - specifically JPEG slideshows and videos. I am thinking about building myself a new HTPC and instalilng XBMC on it.
Before buying all the hardware, I figured I'd give XBMC a spin on an old HTPC PC I built 5 years ago. All of my media is on a NAS with gigabit connection and I conncted the HTPC via wired, 100mbs.

Everything installed fine, but when I added the NAS source for my photos folder, loading up the file thumbnails, navigating the folders, etc was extermely slow, and the slideshow was painfully slow as well (when manually advancing there was a large delay before the next photo displayed).

My question is - is this most likely a limitation of the hardware and network specs of the PC I was testing with, or should I expect to see these kinds of speeds even on a new PC with updated specs? I was hoping that when I have gigabit HTPC connection and faster CPU/graphics card everything would be more speedy. Does XBMC have any kind of built-in caching so that it doesn't have to download all the directory info each time? How to most people set this up?

Also, one more question - I have videos that I take with my point and shoot camera mixed in my photos folder. Is there any way to play these videos when looking at photos as well, or do I have to navigate separately to the videos menu?

Thanks!
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#2
I am streaming my media over a 1GB wired home network and everything runs smoothly.

I am also running just an onboard nvidia 9400 video chip and have had no problems with that either.

Hope you find your answers.

TC Nod
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#3
I discarded Gigabit LANs some time ago. Gave up because wireless networks are getting rather good.
Over the years I noticed a couple of things: a 100Mbit LAN will top at 8 or 9 MBs. A 1000Mbit LAN will top at 14 or 15MBs. That's Megabytes. More than enough to run any content you may have.

For reference only, my NAS/main HTPC can stream HD content trough my 300Mbits TP-Link N router to anywhere inside the house without a glitch. It really gets boring when things work as they should.

In your case, I bet in some sort of network misconfiguration or the old PC is the culprit. Try with another machine. Copy the pictures/photos/whatever to another machine and try adding that as a source to the HTPC you're testing.

No, you can't play videos from the photo player.
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#4
Thanks for the replies. When people talking about "streaming" is this the same as reading files off an smb share? Are there other faster ways to add a NAS source than using the smb option?

One of my main requirements for my HTPC solution is to be able to view all my photos and home videos on my TV. I'm wondering if XBMC is the best solution for that out there now? It is a bit annoying to have to navigate back and forth between the photos and video menus. Is there another option, where you can just browse a folder and it will play whatever media happens to be in it?
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#5
XBMC can do what you want, aka slideshow. Look here

As for the rest, you can, in a broad sense, consider passing content from source to destination as streaming content. And no, photos are nowhere near as heavy as HD content.

I don't know about the speed limitations of SMB shares and other share types. Or their performance compared to one another.
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#6
hudo Wrote:I discarded Gigabit LANs some time ago. Gave up because wireless networks are getting rather good.
Over the years I noticed a couple of things: a 100Mbit LAN will top at 8 or 9 MBs. A 1000Mbit LAN will top at 14 or 15MBs. That's Megabytes. More than enough to run any content you may have.

Hmm. Why am I getting 90MB/s then?
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#7
Megabytes? Sustained or peak?
Hardware and cables used? I'm curious. The maximum I saw was 30MB peaks while testing LAN performance.
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#8
hudo Wrote:Megabytes? Sustained or peak?
Hardware and cables used? I'm curious. The maximum I saw was 30MB peaks while testing LAN performance.

Yeah, that's really slow. I typically get 60 - 70MB/sec read from my underpowered atom based freenas box (using green drives no less). IME streaming a blu ray iso requires about 6MB/sec.
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#9
hudo Wrote:Megabytes? Sustained or peak?
Hardware and cables used? I'm curious. The maximum I saw was 30MB peaks while testing LAN performance.

I have a number of servers that exchange data over a private GHz link (i.e. only the servers are on the network, so no contamination from workstations) and I routinely see sustained speeds in excess of 100MB/sec when copying files 10 - 100GB in size.

You need ideal conditions for this sort of speed. The servers have quad core CPUs, server grade NICs and 8 disk RAID arrays. Still, it shows what can be done.

JR
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#10
That's using top notch hardware in very favorable conditions. I'm no network expert, far from it, but seems to me that expensive hardware, cables, etc might account for 70 or 80% of that kind of performance.
What are the real-life every day top speeds to expect, with hardware sold today to the average Joe?

Sorry OP, this is getting way off-topic.
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#11
hudo Wrote:Megabytes? Sustained or peak?
Hardware and cables used? I'm curious. The maximum I saw was 30MB peaks while testing LAN performance.

Sustained write to the cache drive on my unraid box (GBE, Celeron CPU, SSD cache). I get slightly higher speeds reading/writing between Win7/Server 2008 systems. At work we get an additional 10% (sometimes more) with server grade hardware.

There are a lot of people that are having network speed issues with Win7. It appears to be driver related but could easily be improper setups.

At work I'd probably tolerate 30MB/s on a desktop that was lightly used. If a server was that slow I would be putting some time into it to fix the problem.
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#12
hudo Wrote:That's using top notch hardware in very favorable conditions. I'm no network expert, far from it, but seems to me that expensive hardware, cables, etc might account for 70 or 80% of that kind of performance.
What are the real-life every day top speeds to expect, with hardware sold today to the average Joe?

Sorry OP, this is getting way off-topic.

Disk speed is probably the main factor. If you want to copy data at 100MB/sec you obviously need to be able to read the data and at the other end write it to disk at 100MB/sec. That may not sound so fast these days, but remember that during the copy the disk subsystem has to compete for CPU and interrupts with the network stack. I use Dell Perc 5/i and 6/i controllers and I absolutely *love* them as the RAID 5 performance is stellar.

Unless you use a horribly cheap and nasty network card any modern network card should be up to the job. 100MB/sec uses a significant amount of CPU and might strain an Intel Atom, but then you're unlikely to combine an Intel Atom CPU with a Perc controller :-)

JR
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