Hd Video Playback Hangs ?

[zosky]

hi yall

in the course of a movie or a few tvShows (720p.mkv) playback hangs for a few seconds. we've been dealing with this issue for a year and im exhausted trying to find the needle in this haystack. i realize asking for a solution is absurd, but advice or direction that helps me understand why this is happening would be appreciated.

our network is chunky; (2geeks=) 4deskTops, 2laptops, 2smartPhones, 2tablets, & 2routers ... our media (movies/tv/pix/music/backUps) live in 11TB mdadm raid6 ubuntuServer. Bits are consumed from all the other devices in a variety of ways (http/nfs/ssh/smb/mySQL/rsync/dropBox).

we use win7, mint12, and ubuntu to connect to the NAS. for the last month, all use NFS. each of them skips in xbmc, vlc & smplayer... so i've ruled out client side issues. the server logs were full of errors, so bro switched from samba to NFS in win7... no more errors, but still skipping (i really wanted it to be winBlow’s fault :) ).

i've tried correlating skipTimes to cron jobs. i've tried watching top to see if something goes crazy (transmission-daemon/apache/sshd...). we both use transmission-GUI to monitor the daemon... we set update frequencies (from 5) to 60sec....

all the PCs playing HD can r/w to the server at 10mb/s (our max). when i monitor bandwidth during a stream i see ~600kb/s & spikes of 2-3mb/s every few seconds... so mathematically 2 (possibly 3) steams should work simultaneously ... before we need to upgrade to gBit

i think its the server choking (mdadm, nfs or eth1 ?) or perhaps one of our routers is slowly dying ?

if anyone can school me in the darkArts of network management, i would be eternally grateful... any helpful suggestions would also be acceptable.

thanks

~ zosky

Edited July 18, 2012 by zosky