John, I have just started to get similar problems with my Slimp3 player (doesn't seem to affect the later players. They have bigger buffers but I haven't done much testing to see if the interface hangs on those from time to time as well). Mine are all connected wirelessly, and so I always look at this first whenever theres a problem. It's run for 3 years without issue but now for some reason, this one player skips every few minutes, and the interface locks up too. If the outage is short, it will recover. If longer, the player chnages state to "Stopped".
I did much the same tests as you have done - pinging the player from the server and observing the lights on the WiFi bridge at the player end tell me that packets are still streaming to the player during these outages. I observed the processor load on the server which was always very light. Just to be sure I reniced all the slimserver user's procs to -10. I also fired up a laptop as a player with a WiFi card and placed it next to the WiFi bridge for the player - this plays just fine, but I was just playing the "stream.mp3" in a software player so the buffer was most likely huge in comparison. Polling the status on the WiFi bridge, it consistently gets 80% signal strength. I swapped out the 11b WiFi bridge for a 11g one - no change. Re-flashed the AP to latest firmware. Reflashed the Slimp3 to latest firmware. Also tried ramping up the TX power on the AP - which is reflected in the signal strength at the player end but makes no difference - as throughout all these outages, the network appears to perform faultlessly. As packets are still coming thick and fast when playback stops (and the counter halts a few seconds earlier on the player), I suspect that the fault lies in the firmware on the player (the server is, after all, still transmitting the stream). This is why I reflashed it, in case the image had become corrupted somehow but it had no effect. It may be that it's the ACKs and other replies from player to server that are failing to be received, and so after a while the server (or some other layer in the network stack) gives up. I played around with the antennae settings on my AP I'm going to experiment with the player some more tomorrow on a wired connection straight into the server's switch to see if I can get it to do the same (and eliminate the network as the problem). One other thing I've considered: I notice a lot of ARP traffic on my network, with the server constantly asking for the MAC of the player, and vice versa etc (plus every other device chattering ARP). I might try some static ARP entries for the players and see if that cures it. In the back of my mind though - I keep coming back to the fact that this all worked fine up until a couple of days ago - and as far as I can tell - nothing has changed. Cheers, Owen -- Scooter ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Scooter's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=929 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=7641 _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
