Network dropouts OS X 10.11 (El Capitan)

Support
1

Anyone experienced any issues?

Background: OS X 10.10 had been rock solid for me - including Roon. Not a single dropout in the whole time I’ve had it setup - even multi-zoned and grouped, with combinations of Tidal, local, and radio. It was the role model setup :wink:

Jump to last week when I upgraded to 10.11 - ironically as a last ditch attempt to get Devialet AIR working (which I still haven’t tried but 10.11 seems to be reported as good) - and now am getting the occasional stutter of 0.5 sec or 1s with Roon. Mainly seems to be affecting the pi2-hifiberry zone which is usually playing Tidal. It happens intermittently from few seconds to hours, then often clears. Rebooting the Mac makes it go away.

Obviously there’s a lot more trouble-shooting I can do (it could be a lot of things I guess), but just wondered whether it’s happening to anyone else who upgraded OS?

2

Hi @hifi_swlon ---- Thank you for the report and my apologies for the slow response. In order for me to accurately evaluate this issue, I would like to gather the following information from you. Please see below. Thanks!

  1. Can you please provide a detailed description of your current setup, as seen here.

  2. Can you please describe (in detail) the topology of your network, as well as providing what specific networking hardware you may be implementing in your setup. I want to get a precise understanding of how everything is communicating.

-Eric

3

Hi Eric, thanks for following up.

I placed the topic in #support as I wasn’t really sure where to put it - but I was really wondering whether anyone had experienced any network issues after updating to 10.11 - and not specifically with Roon.

But I should list this anyway:

RoonServer (latest)
Mac mini, late 2012, 2.5ghz i5, 8gb ram
OS X 10.11.6
Music and OS local SSD

mac minimal apps installed but does have carbon copy cloner and a few other utilities. iTunes runs in the bg (for music import only).

3x zones:
Raspberry pi 2, RoonBridge, raspbian, hifiberry DAC plus (phone jack version)
Raspberry pi3, Dietpi RoonBridge, iqaudio DAC
Microrendu into Devialet 200.

All hard-wired cat5e into gigabit switch (little netgear 308), and onto cable router/modem.

Very occasional stutter on the hifiberry zone, most likely playing Tidal, and most likely at least one other zone playing something. Stutters are short, and often go away after a minute or so. Once or twice have persisted and restarting RoonServer machine sorted it. I had one or two stutters on the rendu but that was a one-off.
Last couple days been totally stable again.

I’m assuming it’s something background in 10.11 or something weird with the upgrade. It makes me nervous though as in a year or more no stutters with Roon ever (except one when I left the wifi and Ethernet active at the same time on the core).

It could be anything I know - from the router, Tidal servers, internet connection, the pi, the Mac, and endless other things. That’s why I wondered if anyone else had experienced it before I started trouble-shooting or reverting back to 10.10.

I had run a CAD optimisation script on the Mac with 10.10, so some of that’s probably ruined now, or maybe has left a mess.

Thinking about it if I can find the time I might just do a fresh install and see what happens then.

(Ps it would be great if Roon could extract all the info about the setup to paste here, so we could just fill in the blanks…)

4

Hi @hifi_swlon---- Thank you for the insight and the follow up, both are appreciated! I see from your report, the following observations have been made:

  1. Very occasional stutter on the hifiberry zone, most likely playing Tidal, and most likely at least one other zone playing something. Stutters are short, and often go away after a minute or so. Once or twice have persisted and restarting RoonServer machine sorted it. I had one or two stutters on the rendu but that was a one-off. Last couple days been totally stable again.
  1. It could be anything I know - from the router, Tidal servers, internet connection, the pi, the Mac, and endless other things. That’s why I wondered if anyone else had experienced it before I started trouble-shooting or reverting back to 10.10.

In reference to the above:

  1. Has the Microrendu into Devialet 200, exhibited any of these behaviors? I know from in your initial report you mentioned that you haven’t tried this zone yet since the update to 10.11.

  2. Can you think of any patterns in behavior (between the three audio zones mentioned above), that get you into this state, while using Roon?

  3. Does the content being streamed have any forbearance on this issue? Same / different codecs? Bit rates?

Thanks!
-Eric

5

Hi Eric.

I’m starting to think this is restricted to a Tidal/internet radio, but I still need to do more tests.
The mR is generally fine but at the peak yesterday it had one dropout.
Today both pis were dropping out (one running solo with Tidal, the other grouped with the rendu playing internet radio which would just stop, and need to press play again to resume).

I rebooted the Mac for speed and again it worked afterwards.

My hunch is it’s a weird network thing post-upgrade. Urgh. So little time to look into it. So annoyed about updating! Haven’t even got time to go back to 10.10 right now.

Will try and do some more tests over the coming days. Seems like it’s not that common otherwise we’d probably hear from a few other people…

6

@hifi_swlon ---- Thank you for the feedback and the insight. Based on these most recent observations, I agree that there would seem to be some sort of networking troubles going on here.

I completely understand your frustration as network troubleshooting is probably the most taxing and painful part of the support we do here. As I am sure you know, It frequently involves painstaking experimentation, changing one variable at a time and then waiting for an intermittent issue to recur.

Please keep me updated on results of your testing and I will glad to help in any way possible :slight_smile:

-Eric

7

Having exhausted everything else, I finally took the plunge and reinstalled a fresh OS X 10.11. What a PITA that was!

So far, trouble free for the past couple days. I’ll need a week to be sure, but my hunch is it was the upgrade, or a fuse utility I’d installed (I was testing a few on that machine)

Anyway, will report back.

8

Looks like we’re good!

Happy. Back to a rock solid Roon.

Was worth the hassle. :grinning:

1 Like
9

Steve (@hifi_swlon ) ---- Thank you for the follow up! Glad to hear that things have stabilized :thumbsup: :clap: Happy listening!

-Eric

10

OK, this reoccured, and I’ve captured some roonserver logs which contain some obvious dropout error messages. I’m sure now’s a busy time with your upcoming release, but if you get a window to take a look over the coming months, I’d be interested to know your thoughts . In all cases, restarting roonserver fixes it - at least four a period of time (days/weeks/months).

Some key lines are below. This was streaming a low quality mp3:

01/21 20:39:02 Trace: [transport/raatclient] GOT [1403] {"status":"Success"}
01/21 20:39:07 Trace: [prebuffer] status 441000/441000 (100%) @ 6/358 sec
01/21 20:39:13 Trace: [prebuffer] status 441000/441000 (100%) @ 10/358 sec
01/21 20:39:13 Trace: [transport/raatclient] GOT [1402] {"samples":29,"status":"Dropout"}
[repeated....]

01/21 20:39:13 Info: [stats] 5441mb Virtual, 2511mb Physical, 1311mb Managed, 87 Threads,  FDs 
01/21 20:39:13 Trace: [transport/raatclient] GOT [1402] {"samples":3528,"status":"Dropout"}
01/21 20:39:18 Trace: [prebuffer] status 441000/441000 (100%) @ 18/358 sec
01/21 20:39:23 Trace: [prebuffer] status 441000/441000 (100%) @ 23/358 sec
01/21 20:39:28 Trace: [prebuffer] status 441000/441000 (100%) @ 28/358 sec
01/21 20:39:31 Trace: [transport/raatclient] GOT [1402] {"samples":3795,"status":"Dropout"}

01/21 20:39:31 Trace: [transport/raatclient] GOT [1402] {"samples":882,"status":"Dropout"}
01/21 20:39:33 Trace: [zoneplayer/raat] sync snd_rpi_hifiberry_dacplus: realtime=150754688852408 rtt=477us offset=-44294352977us delta=492us drift=11us in 31.3491455s (0.356ppm, 1.282ms/hr)
01/21 20:39:33 Trace: [prebuffer] status 441000/441000 (100%) @ 33/358 sec
01/21 20:39:38 Trace: [prebuffer] status 441000/441000 (100%) @ 38/358 sec
01/21 20:39:43 Trace: [prebuffer] status 441000/441000 (100%) @ 43/358 sec
01/21 20:39:49 Trace: [transport/raatclient] GOT [1402] {"samples":4249,"status":"Dropout"}
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