Mybook live slow short reads

[mesa57]

I recently bougth a mybook live (green light).
File copy performance is good on the gigabyte network, about 35 Mb/sec.
However if I try to play an 11 Gb .mkv movie with bsplayer, it scans the file end by about 300.000 reads with length 1. This takes very long (30 - 50 secs), with a speed of 235 Kb/sec. Also bsplayer reports that it cannot open the file after while. Luckely it starts playing the file reading chunks of 65k which come in at 2 Mb/sec.

Anyone knows why this nas is so slow on short reads ?

 

[thiggins]

If I understand your question correctly, performance on any NAS is going to drop once you start moving the drive head around a lot or doing more network transfers.

 

[mesa57]

BSPlayer scans the end of the file.
With procmon I could see it issues a lot of 1 byte reads, but not random, sequentially. What puzzeled me was the putting the file on a share of an old pc solved the problem. Bsplayer started the movie in 1-2 seconds instead of 90 secs from the nas drive. That ruled out network problems of the client.

BUT : after an 8 hours of experimenting I found the bug in the MyBook Live.
The movie(s) is contained in a seperate share called Films with permissions to everybody. If I copy the file to the predefined public\shared videos folder on the Mybook access via Bsplayer is suddenly just as fast as from other network drives (1-2 sec).

This is definitely a bug in the WD Mybook live

 

[thiggins]

This is definitely a bug in the WD Mybook live

Or it could mean that BSPlayer depends somehow on UPnP/DLNA, which is what those dedicated shares are for.

 

[mesa57]

Bsplayer is a simple player which does not support dnla or upnp.
The user share also was defined for dnla sharing.
I've mailed WD support and hopefully get an answer.
For the time being, i'll move all my .mkv's to the public folder (takes time, it is about 400 Tb).