[nas] NAS freezing up

[David Woodfall]

On (11/04/13 14:46), David Woodfall <dave at dawoodfall.net> put forth the proposition:
>On (10/04/13 08:39), Paul Fox <pgf at foxharp.boston.ma.us> put forth the proposition:
>>erik wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> On Wed, Apr 10, 2013 at 05:26:26AM +0100, David Woodfall wrote:
>>> > I've been using nas a while now and I'm finding that it seems to
>>> > freeze up at times. It happens randomly and is hard to predict. I have
>>> > to kill -9 it, restart it, hit play on umplayer to continue watching.
>>> >
>>> > Is there any way of debugging this? I've tried running it with verbose
>>> > but nothing is showing in the console.
>>>
>>> By default, all logging is via syslog. There is a debug option available as
>>> well that increases the info over verbose.
>
>I can't see anything useful in the log even with debug at 99.. there's
>also nothing useful in mplayer output. I may have a go at an strace
>although I fear the strace log is going to huge since it happens maybe
>every other movie or so.
>
>I never saw this behaviour until I upgraded my old media box from an
>old Athlon XP 32bit to a new dual core 64bit machine. I'm wondering if
>it's a hardware or even network problem. Not quite sure where to look
>at the moment.

I think I can say that it isn't a network problem - I just pulled the
network cable on my laptop while playing and I only had to pause/play
mplayer and it continued with no problem and without having to restart
nasd.

I also checked the dates of my /dev/dsp* to see whether perhaps
something flakey was happening with the USB output but they haven't
been recreated since I booted the box up some months back.

>>i've been seeing this as well, though i think it started for me when i
>>began running nasd via /usr/bin/aoss, to get it to play well with alsa
>>(in particular, dmix).

What is your output device? USB, SPDIF, analog? My old box used coax
and optical, but this new one only has onboard USB and analog outs since 
I haven't yet bought a decent sound card for it. Wondering if the
onboard USB is flakey...

>>when i've strace'd a hung process, it's always been stuck on a futex
>>call, but that doesn't narrow it down much.