Ok, first off, I've read that for movies peeps are supposed to use smb. I was doing that for a while, but I've intermittently ran into problems with a bottleneck somewhere in my network causing the xfer to be too slow. it wasn't because my cache was too small...
I think many people have this problem but think it's that their cache is too small and they haven't found a solution. Well friends, I now have a tested solution that I think may help a lot of you. Lemme tell what I have, and what I was exeriencing.
Computer:
Dual AMD 2200 MP
2GB of ram
bunches of harddrives 280GB total
cd burner
dvd rom drive..
XP professional SP1
dual monitors, etc, etc....
ok, that's not important, my networking equipment is important...
I use a 10/100 PCI NIC in 100mbit mode
Linksys 5 port hub
linksys 5 port router
I also have a separate wifi adapter for another network aside from my xbox.
My configuration is as follows and *THIS* bit of information, I know would answer a TON of other networking questions on this site....
I have cable internet, that's plugged into the uplink port on my router. Then I have a single patch from my router to the uplink port on my hub, which has my PC and my xbox plugged into it.
This is so that the PC and xbox are on a private network, but both have access to the internet independently as the gateway is set as 192.168.0.1 which is my router.
PC's ip address is .2 and Xbox is .3
This is how you should properly network the two if you want both devices to have net access but not be wide open visible on the net(firewall/IDS in the router).
ok, here's what I was experiencing...
I had about the same performance from both SMB shares and XNS shares...
sometimes the movie would work and it'd slow down for no reason(the server stream, not the movie itself). and it'd freeze or skip and I'd have to pause it to let the cache build up slowly then watch a little bit, etc, etc. It always worked well for music but that's because the xfer rate is so slow compared to movies that it wasn't really an issue for my hardware.
I tried eerything, I originally thought it was just a bottle neck with the xbox hardware. even uploading games or movies to the hd took hours instead of minutes...
As most of you should know, the xbox has a 10/100mbit nic inside, which is actually quality hardware(yay MS got something right). So my entire network was always running in 100mbit mode, but I'd be lucky to get 1 or 2mbit. for the average divx movie, the stream is required to be an average of 1.3mbit depending upon the quality of the stream.
Here's what I did, and I did it by accident.
I was having problems burning cd's with my sony 52x burner. i was frustrated, it just sounded busted, so I went to sony's website and looked at their support section and it gave me a couple of hardware tweaks to try... sure enough, my cd burner works again..
Combine these tweaks with a small software tweak that I did for another reason and it fixed my networking issue. XNS is now way faster than smb.
Here's what I did.
for some reason CDR drives poll memory for no reason even if you're not doing anything.. and this slows anything else that uses DMA(direct memory access). Specifically, my NIC uses DMA... I think some of you may know where this is going.
Here's the steps I took...
I only have windows XP PRO SP1, so I'm not sure how this is gona work for other OS's
Firstly, find the file c:windowscdilla16.exe and delete the little sucker...
this is a legacy program that gets called by software that windows can't determine if it's a true 32 bit application. it's a waste of memory, it's a waste of processor cycles(very noticable if you have a slower machine). This program monitors DMA requests given by programs that call it. i.e. relax.exe even when installed as a service will call this program as soon as it's instructed to use the NIC to stream media. thus slowing down the xfer.. just delete it, unless you intend on running programs for Windows 3.1, you'll never need it. don't delete any other cdilla files..
secondly, go into your device manager and select your EIDE/ATAPI controllers, you'll see your harddrive controller or "primary channel" and "secondary channel" Don't mess with your primary channel unless all you have is a harddrive and a cd burner on ONE cable. If that's the case, your cd burner will be device 1(hdd will be device 0).
In my case, I have two hd's and two cd devices. I selected my secondary channel and changed the transfer mode for device 1(second in the list for the second channel) from "DMA if availible" to "PIO only". This will NOT affect performance of your CD burner... It will however free up clock cycles for the NIC to use memory. they won't but heads anymore...
You must also make sure that auto-insertion notification is turned OFF for your cd burner.
Why this works???
Relax is a great program, don't get me wrong, but programs never come finished or there wouldn't be updates... maybe it's time for an update to solve this DMA problem.
MS should also patch SMB to work with the DMA issues that cd burners can cause. Normally several devices accessing the memory at the same time directly isn't that big a deal. Sometimes they step on eachother and the one that got stomped has to try again, which takes time, which slows things down.
What I experience now:
90mbit/s while caching... my cache which is 16 megs, fills up almost instantly. No lag, no issues, everything plays, even uncompressed AVI's!!!! I have an AVI that's 720x480 that's uncompressed, it's 10 seconds long and it's 30 megs big.. it plays with no issues...
I hope this solves some of the problems that I know a lot of you have been experiencing.
Peace..
Vex
