During a marathon 12 day stint I upgraded the Raid 5 array to Raid 6. It took almost 12 days to reshape the array. Awful.<\/p>\n
Almost immediately thereafter, playback on XBMC became unwatchable, jerking and stuttering. For 2 nights I have been able to watch nothing. Is this coincidence, or is this problem owing to the new Raid setup?<\/p>\n
Well, it wasn’t the raid array, proving once again that coincidences actually do happen. I moved a movie to the local hard drive, and played it there – the raid array not involved. And it still has the issue.<\/p>\n
After some diagnostics and some reading, I did two things together. I reset the SMC, and I cleaned the air intakes of dust. I should have done them separately, but I didn’t. I powered down, unplugged everything, took off the bottom, blew out the dust with a can of air, plugged it all back in. Having unplugged I have reset the SMC. Some reading suggests that the need to do SMC resets may be a harbinger of impending power supply failure. We will see. For now it works.<\/p>\n
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It worked for half a day, then began to fail again. In the end, the way I fixed this had to do with Boinc. I’ve always run Boinc, and never have had any problem with competition for resources. But this time, after a lot of attempts at a lot of different things, it turned out that if I stop Boinc the movies play, if I run Boinc they don’t. I changed the parameters on the mac mini so Boinc will only compete if the cpus are idle and have been idle for 3 minutes. Problem solved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
During a marathon 12 day stint I upgraded the Raid 5 array to Raid 6. It took almost 12 days to reshape the array. Awful. Almost immediately thereafter, playback on XBMC became unwatchable, jerking and stuttering. For 2 nights I have been able to watch nothing. Is this coincidence, or is this problem owing to … Continue reading XBMC Mac Mini Stuttering<\/span>