Tough one. You could keep an SSH session running and see if you can see anything iffy on top or free, though, given the observed break in the system journal entries, I suspect you might get no response. If you can narrow things down to when you perform a particular action or sequence of actions, that might also help.
Could the following be a factor in this:
I’ve never had a problem with accessing the drive over the Samba share from my PC, but just there when I was getting ready to copy a file to a folder on the RPi network, expanding the folder structure took 5 or so seconds, when previously with the BPi it was instant.
Could it be something to do with a power saving mode for the drive being connected via USB3 (the actual drive is connected to a SATA to USB3 adaptor with a separate power cable going into the adaptor). In that, the drive goes to idle/power saving in a short space of time, and then when it is being accessed for something not in its cache, it takes a moment to spin up and this causes the delay with the front end machine? Is there a way to increase the length of time before the drive goes idel/power saving, if this is a possibility?
Did the hang occur when you tried to play a file? I’d be surprised if the whole OSMC box were to freeze while one application waits for I/O.
Have a look at this thread: Power settings with External Drive You might be able to set the spindown time using hdparm, but in that thread @darwindesign mentions that some WD drives ignore this sleep setting when sent from the operating system.
You might try making a profile on one of the Veros that is not using MySQL and just scrape one of your sources and see how it performs. If it runs good with that configuration then delete that profile and make another new one pointing to your MySQL but add a name tag which will create a second Kodi db and then scrape a source and see how that acts. This should isolate the issue as being with MySQL or your imported db. To save yourself some effort you can selectively copy files (advancedsettings.xml, sources.xml, passwords.xml) from .kodi/userdata to .kodi/userdata/profiles/[name of profile]/. It would be best to only use profiles for testing though as they are not supported with My OSMC (including using that to set your db) and our log uploader.
That is one of the occurrences that can cause a hang. Frustratingly, it doesn’t after a reboot, so capturing the logs for it isn’t the cleanest.
So just there I rebooted after starting a debug, went to capture the hang by playing an episode of 24… it played straight away. Went and tried an Episode of The Mandalorian which it did hang on earlier, and it played fine. So I left it for 5 or so minutes, probably longer, and then went to play an episode of Lost in Space, and there was a hang for about 3-5s longer than the usual start up speed. It was hanging for longer earlier Maybe 5-10s prior to rebooting. So in this log, it was at the playing of the lost in space episode that there is the hang - https://paste.osmc.tv/akafutuwon
I’ll be honest here, I don’t think I know what you mean. Don’t both the Veros use MySQL to access the database on the network drive? Or do you mean scrape it so that all info is stored locally on that Vero rather than accessing the SQL database on the RPi? As I’m typing this, I’m thinking that is exactly what you mean…
I’ll figure out how to do all that and then get back to you, as I’m not sure how to go about making profiles, so will look that up.
Unrelated to DD’s post, but just general info on what else I’ve tried today = I wiped the MySQL server from the RPi, and reinstalled it, then imported the library through kodi rather than through the MySQL which I did the other day. I also changed the IP address of the RPi from it being the same IP as the previous BPi, just incase there was something I missed somewhere and it was causing confusion somehow. So again, there was a fresh MySQL DB set up from the library import.
but it didn’t really change anything. Still frequent hangs, and loading of art being quite slow at times. It is especially slow if I refresh something in the library and rescrape it from the internet (e.g. when I’ve upgraded the film from 720p to higher resolution, but kept the file name the same). The actual scraping is done at regular speed, but once it is done, even if on the info screen after the refresh all the art is showing, when I go back into the library listing, the artwork is not there and is black screen for a good 5-10s before it finally reappears.
The profiles are like user accounts in Windows. They can be created in Kodi’s settings and be switched between with the power menu. This is just a method I personally use sometimes when testing thing as they allow me, without touching my working setup, to test out things in a relatively stock environment. They can also be easily deleted in their entirety, again, without touching my main working profile. The test I suggested was to isolate out MySQL issues from other issues which it sounds like you have done with a slightly route.
As for sleeping drives it seems strange to me that this would happen in five min but an easy test would be to just stick your hand on the drive as you tell the media to play. It should be fairly obvious if the drive spins up.
Yeah, I’d like to do that, unfortunately being a network drive, it is in a different room, on a different floor.
I’ll try out the profiles when I get the chance.
That’ll probably be my last thing I try, then I’ll go back to the BPi. I only bought the RPi as I saw one at a decent price new, and who doesn’t like new shiny gadgets! And going from a very fluctuating 20-30MB/s transfer speeds from my PC to the drive with the BPi to about a flat 80MB/s with larger files with the RPi was appealing, but the amount of time I’ve spent troubleshooting has negated the time I save!
Had a look at that page, and followed some discussion and links, tried the HDPARM service, but couldn’t get it to work. So then tried the HD-IDLE one. It went through all the commands ok, so have now set the idle time for the hdd as 6 hours. If it works that should rule out any quick spin down times that there currently are… Will find out tomorrow as I’m giving up for tonight!