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I observed a strange phenomenon with my Rhythmbox: it seems that Rhythmbox is constantly downloading a MP3 file while playing it.

My setup

My home server (hostname nas) which host the MP3 files uses Debian GNU/Linux 7.6 (wheezy), up-to-date too. The files are on a RAID 1 with 2 disks. It shares the files through a samba share, the configuration file only contains the different mount points (I didn't changed any configuration).

My local computer runs Rhythmbox 3.0.2 and Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS, everything is up-to-date. The SAMBA share is mounted with a cifs mount point in /etc/fstab:

//nas/raid /mnt/nas cifs  _netdev,rw,users,iocharset=utf8,uid=1000,sec=none,file_mode=0777,dir_mode=0777 0 0

I disabled the auto-discovery of new files in the library and fadding between files in the settings of Rhythmbox.

Screenshots

Here is a screenshot of the system monitor after starting to play a MP3 file with Rhythmbox:

Rhythmbox

We can see a peak at 32 MiB/s after I clicked on play. The size of the file is only 4.6 MB, the difference between the peak and the actual size of the file may only be an artefact of the system monitor.

After 10 seconds I pressed pause, then 10 seconds later I pressed play, and repeated this pattern. We can see that when Rhythmbox is playing the MP3 something is downloaded at a speed of 2 MiB/s. But there is no network activity when Rhythmbox is paused. So this implies that all the network activity is due to Rhythmbox.

Here is the result with another MP3 file, with a size of 8 MB:

Rhythmbox

It looks like Rhythmbox download data every 45 seconds to cache a part of the MP3 file before playing it.

Comments

So I don't understand why Rhythmbox seems to download constantly the same file instead of using a cache or a buffer. I restarted Rhythmbox and played the file I used for the first screenshot and it looked like the second screenshot: bandwidth was only used after I pressed play and every 45 seconds. So the problem is also appearing randomly.

5
  • This question can be closed, I have not seen this problem for a long time. Maybe because of the the Ubuntu upgrades.
    – A.L
    May 1, 2016 at 22:40
  • I don't see what the problem with such a behaviour would be in the first place. May 3, 2016 at 15:41
  • @DavidFoerster It was more a question about curiosity than a problem to solve, as you said it didn't prevent Rhythmbox for working.
    – A.L
    May 3, 2016 at 15:46
  • Ok, but AU is not a good place for this kind of questions. You would need to ask the developers for details on such decisions. We cannot look into their heads. May 3, 2016 at 15:54
  • @DavidFoerster We don't know if it comes from samba, rhythmbox, etc. Nevertheless I should have compared the result with a file on filesystem and a file shared through samba.
    – A.L
    May 3, 2016 at 16:00

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