Win Why has buffering suddenly got worse?
#1
Sorry to be posting another buffering story, but searching the forum proves everyone seems to have their own unique experience. I'm hoping the information here will make this fairly straightforward for experienced eyes.

The 'blurby' bit: I have an atom-based home server running WHS 2011. It has several drives within it, some holding HD movie rips (MKV) and some SD (also MKV). It is connected to a gigabit switch with cat5e. If we ignore the HD rips for now (I have wiring plans for them), the SD movies are available wirelessly to a variety of devices and I've enjoyed watching films on an iPad via Air Video Server and on several PCs running Windows Media Centre, basic Media Player Classic and recently XBMC via SMB shares.

In the last week I've noticed a buffering issue I've never had before while viewing via XBMC. As part of my experimenting to find a cause, I've done some viewing via Media Player Classic and noted one occurrence of buffering (admittedly it was a short test) and so far no buffering issues on the iPad via Air Video Server. Basic performance monitoring on the server suggests there are no network or CPU issues, but I'm a complete novice at this.

I'm sure the easiest thing is just to paste a link to the log, but before I do, here is the technical info for just one device on which I've seen the problem:

Server: WHS2011 Service Pack 1, 64 bit. 4Gb RAM, 1.66Ghz D510 CPU
PC: Windows 7 Home Premium Service Pack 1, 32 bit. 2Gb RAM, i3 2.13Ghz
XBMC 11.0 (20120321)

The log:
Pastebin link

Any help much appreciated!
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#2
Had another go. Different standard def, MKV. I think the critical lines in the log are these:

WARNING: CDVDMessageQueue(audio)::Get - asked for new data packet, with nothing available
19:45:18 T:9104 WARNING: CDVDMessageQueue(video)::Get - asked for new data packet, with nothing available
19:45:18 T:6464 DEBUG: CDVDAudio:Big Grinrain - adding 4032 bytes of silence, buffer size: 8352, chunk size: 12384
19:45:18 T:9104 INFO: CDVDPlayerVideo - Stillframe detected, switching to forced 25.000000 fps

Does this indicate XBMC was left waiting for incoming data? The pause came after only three or four minutes of viewing and lasted about five seconds.
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#3
OK, the performance monitor has revealed one seemingly critical fact - when the buffering problem occurs the Read Aheads/sec counter plunges to zero for several seconds, then zooms back up to maximum. During normal playback it is either at the top or temporarily down 20% or so. Got a feeling this is related to the cache so I'll pursue that avenue of disk performance for now.
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