Environment

(1) Plug (powered, connected to 4-port wifi router via RJ-45/CAT-5 and USB hub)
(1) Powered 4-port USB Hub (connected to the Plug and three drives)
(1) 150 GB External HD
(1) 250 GB External HD
(1) 1 TB External HD

Condition where problem manifests: One computer connected and streaming music via share, another computer attempting to download a file 704 MB in size from outside my LAN.

Issue: Plug becomes unmanageable (cannot access plug from tonidoplug.com, direct IP web connection, or SSH) and unable to browse any of the shares or mapped drives (mapped to each USB drive on the Plug). More information on SSH: The connection is not refused; it connects but then nothing is displayed in the window. Browser connection attempts eventually time out.

Frequency: This has happened five times in a row within a 12 hour period.

Additional information: The Plug does respond to ping requests.

Only known solution: Rebooting the Plug by pulling the power. Merely disconnecting the data connections (canceling the download and/or stopping the streaming or disconnecting the RJ-45 connector for a minute) seems to have no effect on the issue.

Work-arounds: None that I've been able to find.

Continued testing plan: I've removed access to users from outside my LAN to test standard music streaming to my MediaPC and some file transfers from my computer inside my LAN. I will report back in a few hours (or if the issue manifests itself again).

You could open a SSH session first, run top to monitor CPU load and then repeat your experiment to see if the CPU goes to 100%. That could explain it.

Also, when you are streaming song, are you setting it to encode to different encoding quality ? If yes, the plug is trying to do the taxing job of re-encoding the MP3 which takes up a lot of CPU. You can also try listening to music without encoding and seeing if that makes a difference.

Update: I've found that when CPU utilization goes to 100%, the Plug will exhibit very slow performance, and if CPU utilization remains at 100% for an extended period of time, the Plug will not serve the web pages or accept SSH connections.

I have been streaming the music directly from a SAMBA share (no compression by the server) using Winamp on my PC, so it's not effecting the CPU other than for what it takes to serve the files.

I have also been copying files between the drives attached to the Plug via my PC. I know I can do it via SSH, but I'm trying to replicate what more common users would do. So far, I have no problems with the transfers. I have been assigning larger and larger copy tasks and so far, the CPU hasn't been pegging at 100%. The highest utilization recorded has been around 45%.

No lockups or cessations in accessibility yet.

Update: Using top in SSH, I've found that the process smbd never exceeds 11% cpu utilization. I'm currently transferring a directory containing 1.91 GB of files and it's handling that and streaming/serving my music without any hiccups.



I also found out that my friend has been trying to have the Plug zip the large file for transfer. He didn't heed the size restriction (he said he didn't notice it until the fifth time he tried to download the file). Does Tonido not disallow zipping larger than a certain size?

Correct, the limit is 10 MB now, but we just increased it to 500 MB. It should be available in the next TonidoPlug software update we release.

Download zip also has been optimzed to make it use less CPU.

Update: Hours later, the Plug has been performing like a champ. It's in the middle of a 29.9 GB transfer queue (photo images) and it hasn't so much as skipped a beat.

I've had SSH open to the server all day running top, and there have been no strange anomalies. Everything looks normal (and good!).

While I don't have any concrete evidence (logfiles, etc), the observations I've made today lead me to believe that the zip function was the culprit. With large numbers of file transfers, in small and large queues, the Plug has been performing admirably (all while still streaming music and serving up documents to others).

That would explain it. The Zip function was a blocking function which while it was completing would block all other Tonido operation.

The new release would make it completely non-blocking in its own thread so this should no longer be an issue.