NFS and movies

Grell

Grell

Hey I have a FreeBSD system (my main system) that has all my movies and music on it. I just inherited a relative's old Pentium 4 computer and I have put FreeBSD on it. I was able to set up an NFS server on my main system and share the movies and music with this new Pentium 4 system. However, when I try to watch any movies on the client machine, it jerks and lags, which I assume is related to the speed of the network. Both machines are connected to my ISP router, both are "100baseTX full-duplex". Is there a way to make it so it does not lag? Thanks in advance.
 
Grell said:
Is there a way to make it so it does not lag?
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I hope that someone else can help you with upping NFS performance, but failing that perhaps you could consider streaming instead of NFS exporting. My experience is that NFS works ok for smaller files like MP3, but it performs insufficiently for the much larger files that movies usually are. NFS is not without overhead.

Fonz
 
What kind of read speeds are you getting? % time cp /mnt/nfs_shared_movie_dir/bigmovie /local_tmp/

After you copy the movie over and play it from a local folder does it plays OK?

What does top say when you are playing the movie from the nfs share?

What nfs version? What is the main server running? If it's also running FreeBSD and it's sharing a zfs filesystem, you could consider an l2arc on an SSD.
 
Please post /etc/exports and /etc/rc.conf. There are several ways to optimise NFS, but we need to see what you have so far.
 
The relevant parts of /etc/fstab on the client are also helpful (or /etc/amd.map if you are using the automount daemon).
 
It may just be NFS as I've successfully shared FullHD movies, with DTS audio, over a 100Mbit network. But I used net/samba36 for that.

The jerking and lagging may also be caused by the client. If it doesn't have a good videocard or if it's not powerful enough.
 
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