My OpenMediaVault5 experience so far. BUFFERING!

[embyben 6]

I have migrated from years of FreeNAS to OMV5.I used to run two 4TB HD's using ZFS mirror, which worked flawlessly.

My setup is a HP Microserver 2.5Ghz CPU, 16GB RAM.

My setup now is

• OMV5,
• Luks Encryption enabled,
• ext4 file system,
• SnapRaid enabled (1TB data, 4TB data, 4TB parity)
• unionfs
• docker containers
• boot device is a 30GB flash drive
• I also have a 120GB SSD (also encrypted) which is used for config files.

My network is Cat6 Ethernet. My chromecast that plays movies is also on Ethernet.

I am running emby server in a docker container with its own macvlan network.

When i was on FreeNAS my high definition movies played over my network flawlessly! Now they are pausing/buffering randomly which is most annoying given how long it took me to rebuild this server!

My problem is, with this build the buffering problem could be so many reasons. My gut feel is the unionfs and snapraid

Could somebody provide advice at where/how i should investigate? What should i look for in the emby server logs?

Edited January 26, 2021 by embyben

[embyben 6]

I can force a movie to buffer if two emby users try to watch different movies at the same time.

Edited January 26, 2021 by embyben

[Q-Droid 989]

Emby server log and ffmpeg logs would help troubleshoot this. Make sure they include playback sessions with the problem.

What is the CPU?

 

[MRobi 161]

Are the files direct playing or being transcoded? If transcoded, have you checked the reason for transcode in the playback info?

[mastrmind11 722]

this isn't a case of underpowered hardware assuming the only thing that changed was the OS.  However, there were a lot of software/config changes that happened after the migration, which leads me to believe one of those things is the culprit.  An example would be encrypted partitions.  Encryption, no matter the flavor, takes a lot of juice to pull off, and when it's on an entire partition, I can't imagine it is that performant, especially with continuous and sustained reads of the data on massive files.  It wasn't really designed for that use case.  Unionfs is another possibility, though I haven't done much research on it.  I remember seeing others on here using unionfs or similar to drive pool, but depending on your hardware these types of things are all CPU bound, so if your CPU is underpowered to do *all* of this CPU bound stuff, that might be the problem.  On a vanilla FreeNas setup it was fine because it was just that.  Now with all these bells and whistles, you might have bumped up against what your current hardware is truly capable of.  Just a thought, as without your CPU specs and logs, it's pure conjecture.  Post some more info and lets figure this out.

Edited January 26, 2021 by mastrmind11

[Luke 42079]

Hi there @embyben can we please look at an example? Please attach the information requested in how to report a media playback issue. thanks !