New Setup - Sab slow and freezing

[PhantomGhost]

Hi guys, I know this is going to be a bit long, so I want to apologize in advance. I'm fairly new to usenet, but I have been using Sab along with CP and SB for about a year now, and its been amazing. Ive had no problems at all really, until recently. I had the whole setup working a quad core AMD desktop running Ubuntu 12.04. Well, I had some raid issues on that box, lost all of my media, 3TB+ worth, so I thought I would rebuild my set up and make it better and more reliable, and now its turned into a headache...

I have a Dell 2950 III server running ESXi and hosting an Ubuntu 12.04 VM, with the VM directly connected to a FreeNAS box by an NFS share. (the VM has 2 NICs, one dedicated only to it, with a cat 6 cable going straight to a second NIC on the FreeNAS box). Well, I'm having all kinds of issues, and I'm hoping someone might can help me out. This was supposed to be better and faster, and its the complete opposite. Sab used to reliable max out my connection, which I had a 100Mb connection, and it ran full speed all the time (I use Astraweb). Well, while the box was down from raid issues, I upgraded to a 1Gb connection. The Ubuntu VM currently has nothing else running on it besides Sab, SB, and CP. It has 8 cores, and 4 gigs of ram, so hardware wise it should be in great shape, much better than before anyway.

Sab randomly freezes, or partially freezes, download speeds aren't constant at all, they bounce all over the place, and unpacking/repairing takes far longer now than it used to. For example, right now Sab is stuck showing it is downloading at 24.3 MBs, when in reality it isnt downloading at all, it is using no bandwidth. It is however trying to repair a file, a 1.6 gig TV show, and it has spent over half an hour working on that one show. Chances are once that finishes, it may unfreeze and finally update showing the right download speed. A lot of times the GUI will just sit there saying waiting for xxxx (PC's host name) when I try to click anything in Sab, when it used to be instant, anything I did in Sab was instant, never any waiting... I followed this guide http://lefoxdufue.wordpress.com/2013/01 ... ntu-12-04/ for the main setup, and looking at htop on the linux VM, it is completely idle...all 8 cores are sitting there at 1-2%, it is using 1.3 gigs of ram out of 4... I'm stumped.

Any thoughts at all? I would really appreciate it, thanks.

[sander]

Is the Ubuntu VM itself fast and responsive?

Do you download to the NAS, thus over the network? If so: can you download to the local machine, and check the speed?

When SAB is not downloading, is SAB's response fast?

[PhantomGhost]

Yes, the Ubuntu VM itself works very well, very responsive, until Sab messes up, then browsing the NFS share gets really slow, but other things still work fine.

And yes, I have been downloading straight to the NAS because at the moment, the ESXi host has very little storage until I can afford to buy some more SAS drives for it. I will give your advice a shot though, rebooted the VM (which usually makes it work pretty well for a little while) and added a second vdisk to it to act as the temp storage location for Sab. So far so good, but like I said, it usually works alright for a bit after a reboot. I did see the speeds remain fairly consistent this time though, so thats nice, they have been really bad the last 3 days. Maybe this whole mess is caused by the way it writes to the NAS box?

And eh...I have never seen it mess up when it was just idling, but either downloading or unpacking/repairing it has hosed up, not just during the download. On one particular download, during the unpacking stage, it completely locked up both the VM AND the NFS service on the NAS box, I thought that was impressive... I couldn't use the VM at all until I hard reset it, and NFS refused to connect until I rebooted the NAS box, but the CIF share on the NAS box still worked just fine. I tried that 3 different times to make sure it wasnt a fluke, every time on that one download it completely died.

[sander]

I did see the speeds remain fairly consistent this time though, so thats nice, they have been really bad the last 3 days. Maybe this whole mess is caused by the way it writes to the NAS box?

Exactly; there could be a lot of unresponsive I/O.

[PhantomGhost]

After some testing today, I noticed it still gets pretty unresponsive while its unpacking/repairing, but I noticed something that might have caused some of this. Sickbeard was causing a LOT of traffic between the NAS and Ubuntu VM, averaging around 500Mb/s consistently, so I'm working on fixing that now. Not sure if that would have caused all of this or not. But thanks a lot for the suggestion to use a local disk, it looks like that is helped a lot on my download speeds. Earlier I had about 20 episodes queued up in Sab, 2 shows, the first set started downloading fine, about 2 episodes in it got REALLY slow...the speed was going all over the place, but staying below one Mb/s most of the time, the other set then started downloading, and each episode would get to about 95%, then it would go on to the next, it had about 8 episodes sitting there like that, 95% done but not going anywhere, while the first show was still stuck on the same 3rd episode... Finally I cancelled all of that first show, and then Sab came back to life and finished all the downloads for the second show and processed them in no time. I never used to see weird things like that...is there anything I can do to ensure the binaries used for unpacking/repairing are up to date and correct?