Choppy/stuttering playback on gigabit LAN

[Tanyac]

Hi,

I have a home LAN with all cat6 wiring, with gigabit switches. Media files are stored on my server, which runs dual Gbe NICs, with Load Balancing/Fail Over.

When playing back movies over the LAN there is a lot of stuttering/choppiness. Sometimes the movie will freeze for a few seconds. This was horrendously bad in VLC, and I have since migrated all PCs here to Pot Player. When playing a recorded TV show this happens occasionally.

Sources are almost always MKV, which is my preferred recording and backup format. There are the occasional MP4 files. Typically my movies are 1080p. TV shows a mix of 1080p and 720p

All OSs are 64 bit. All have between 8gb and 32gb of RAM minimum speed 2133mhz. All are I5/I7 3rd gen processors.

Can any one suggest any reason for this behavior?

thanks
Tanya

 

[BuddhaSkoota]

What are the intra-Lan transfer speeds? At what speeds are the NICs negotiating? Have you monitored network performance via Task Manager? You'll want to determine if there's a network bottleneck first, then have a closer look at server system performance.

 

[bill001g]

I would try to unplug one the 2 nic cards. Even though they say you can run both on unmanged switches it causes strange issues at times. You can not really bond the ports without support on the switch. I seriously doubt you are exceeding a gig of bandwidth anyway.

 

[Tanyac]

What are the intra-Lan transfer speeds? At what speeds are the NICs negotiating? Have you monitored network performance via Task Manager? You'll want to determine if there's a network bottleneck first, then have a closer look at server system performance.

Typical LAN transfer speeds are around the 100MB/s read and write when copying files to/from the server. Of course these vary a little from time to time, but not much.

All NICs are operating at 1.0Gbps Auto Duplex, according to the Device Manager. I'm running a Broadcom chip and it logs and event to the system log..

"Broadcom NetLink (TM) Gigabit Ethernet: Network controller configured for 1Gb full-duplex link."

Checking the Switch, which is a Netgear GS108T-V2, also shows the link is operating at 1.0Gbps.

 

[Tanyac]

I would try to unplug one the 2 nic cards. Even though they say you can run both on unmanged switches it causes strange issues at times. You can not really bond the ports without support on the switch. I seriously doubt you are exceeding a gig of bandwidth anyway.

Thanks for your reply.

I was under the impression that the Netgear GS108T-V2 was a managed switch.

In any case, I don't expect to exceed 1.0Gbps. The point of the dual NICs is load balancing and fail over. Indeed, the rest of the infrastructure is 1.0Gbps, and that will restrict the dual NICs anyway

There is no evidence that I have ever exceeded 1.0Gbps. However, I can sustain close to that when copying files in both directions.

EDIT: I found a post on another forum discussing remote differential compression. I have turned it off on all PCs. This made no difference.

 

[bill001g]

If the switch supports port bonding then it will work better but you must still configure it. It still will never use both connection on a single connection and it doesn't actually load balance by utilization it mathematically select a path and always uses it for a session. In a worst case all your traffic could go into 1 of the 1gig connection leaving the other idle. This is one of the main reasons that there is a migration to 10g interfaces.

Still its only a guess if it does not get better to unplug it then it is something else.

It is really starting to sound like it is a application issue. Capture the traffic on either the server or the client and see if there is variations in the transmission rates. It should send in a very constant pattern

 

[Kewlx25]

Assuming it's not a throughput issue nor a playback issue, like decoding performance, it could possibly be a latency issue. Check your video player to see if it has some buffer settings that could be increased, like read or render ahead?

 

[yanta]

I really wish people would stop going around various forums making inappropriate selections of what *they* think is the best solution, especially if they are doing it for the wrong reasons, like trying to artificially inflate "resolved post" counts.

Most certainly, bill001g's responses were helpful, but I have not resolved the problem.

Let's also remember, this should not be an issue on A SINGLE GIGABIT connection, let alone a LBFO aggregated connection. The solution to this problem IS NOT to find a way to get my dual NIC properly configured. additionally, *most* people don't have problems over a wired gigabit connection. We should be careful not to imply that people need 2 x 1 gigabit connections to stream movies over a LAN.

Selecting that as the best solution is misleading and will send other would be problem hunters on a wild goose chase.

Indeed, the best I've managed so far, on A SINGLE GIGABIT CONNECTION is using PotPlayer, which exhibits the problems "sometimes". Better than with VLC, MPC and others.