Proppfrexx windows hanging during search and audio hangs

[friso]

Hello

This weekend i had a strange thing during live show. Normaly i have allready made my playlists and do noet any search on additional tracks to play.
But this time i needed a song and did a search in the find window. After giving an enter and starting the search my audio hangs like a stuttering sound as if the record hangs. All windows do not respond. After a couple of seconds stuttering stops and the song remain playing correct. Also my windows and VU meters are working correctly again.

What can the problem be, because i'm afraid to do such a search again during live show.
Running the latest version of proppfrexx version 4.

Friso

[radio42]

Unfortunately I can not reproduce that issue here - nor have I heard about this issue before. So I guess it is not a common issue.

Could it be, that your hard disk (or I/O sub-system in general) was 'hanging' due to the possible TAG reading initiated by the find/search?
E.g. your hard disk (or I/O sub-system) was overall so busy or is so slow, that even the regular playback was 'interrupted'?
Note, that during regular playback and decoding (if the track was not loaded into memory according to your general settings) the audio engine needs to constantly read a next chunk of data from your hard disk (I/O sub-system). The interval and size is controlled by the used driver model's buffer settings.
If that data can not be delivered fast enough from your I/O sub-system, the audio will need to repeat playing back the last data being retrieved. It sounds like you are exactly experiencing this issue (as it sounds like a stuttering record).

However, you describe, that the stuttering was happening for a couple of seconds.
If that was the case, this means, that your I/O sub-system was irresponsable for a couple of seconds!
And this might indicate a severe error/issue.
Is that a network connected drive you using for playback and search or was that all a local drive?

[friso]

The tracks on the playlist i have copied to the local Harddisk, the search event looks on my synology NAS where all my audio is stored.

Friso

[radio42]

The only possible scenario I then can think of is the following (as the audio processing itself as well as the search and find are both running in different threads, it must be a system internal bottleneck/limit/mutex - the entire audio processing is even handled in C/C++ and is fully decupled from the UI, so any interrupt must have a system root cause):
Your NAS might go into sleep mode or your drive mapping was so far not logically connected to your windows. So entering search and thus accessing a NAS path/file must have somehow blocked any resp. all your I/O activity on your PC.

To me this sounds very unlikely, but possible, but I guess with a few tests on your side we might figure it out:

Test 1: Create a media library on your local hard disk (with a few hundred files).
Then select only that media library in the Find Window and perform a search...
If your system doesn't hang; continue with Test 2 - else we can stop here and must search deeper!

Test 2: Reboot your PC and leave your NAS unused for quite some time before (so that the NAS entered sleep mode, if it does), so that we are in a similar and comparable situation as at your weekend.
Now perform the same search over the weekend.
If your system hangs again, fine, we can reproduce it and continue with Test 3 - else it must have been some other reason not related to ProppFrexx or it was another I/O issue.

Test 3: Right after Test 2 came back; we might perform the search a 2nd time. Clear the search result beforehand.
If your system now doesn't hang, we have found the issue and it must be a system issue (either the sleep mode of the NAS or the system blocking any I/O traffic when reconnecting a drive).
If it hangs again, but Test 1 was successful, it might also be system issue with your NAS blocking any/all other I/O traffic while accessing the NAS... in this case please try Test 1 (if available) with another external drive (e.g. a USB drive) using a media library on that one...

[friso]

Bernd

Thanx for the response. I try to this tonight when i'm at home
I will come back with the results.

Thanx
Friso

[radio42]

Any news?

[friso]

Bernd

The last days i was busy syncing audio to an internal drive.
Hopefully this evening or tomorrow i know the results.

Friso

[friso]

Bernd

I have tested it with local files, and the first test faild.
I does it randomly. First i thought it was the large media library, but also selecting one smaller library and hitting the enter button gives the problem.
The complete gui hangs for a couple of seconds en audio starts stuttering.

After a couple of tests, disabeling "use imideately search" in the find window it looks like that solves the problem.
I will do some more testing.

Friso

[friso]

Bernd

It looks like the problemis dissapeard with adjusting he settings i earlier described.
Also i am now using the media library server. Search is much quicker.

Friso