Disk access even when automatic rescan of content disabled

[arnaudvre]

Hi, this question was initially posted on the QNAP forum and with QNAP forum mods instructions I've been able to determine that TwonkyServer was spinning up the disks on my NAS even when nothing is accessing TwonkyServer on the network ie everything on the network is powered off except for TwonkyServer and a smartphone that is not configured for media streaming.

You can find the technical information on how this was determined if it's helpful to resolution on the following post:

http://forum.qnap.com/viewtopic.php?f=5 ... 82#p178982

Could you please help me to force TwonkyServer to *not* access the disks when rescan of content location has been set to manual?

Much appreciated



TwonkyMedia version: 6.0.30
Server hardware: QNAP TS-459 Pro+ Version 3.3.6 Build 1110T
Operating System: Linux QNAP 2.6.33.2
Client(s) and their software version: PS3 (latest update)

Network type: 100Gb/s Wired
Other items on your network: Linksys WRT54G with DD-WRT firmware, XBox360, Windows7 PCs.

[arnaudvre]

Hi all,

I've confirmed it definitely is Twonky spinning up my disks simply by disabling it, the NAS drives don't spin up randomly any more.

I understand this may not sound like much of an issue to you but even disks spinning up every two hours over the course of a year that's a lot of spinning up when the NAS is not being accessed adding to the likelihood of drive failure.

I love Twonky but would also really like to not have to enable it every time I want to stream something from the NAS, defeats the purpose.

Please could you fix the issue?

Thanks much.

[phibertron]

You know I have been thinking about this disc access issue

Sure, setting scantime=0 will stop twonky from scanning for changes to the media shares

So I guess the question would be
If scantime=0 what would Twonky need to spin the disks up to get?

My only guess is this:

Maybe it has something to do with broadcasts
If and when clients came on line, they will broadcast on the network
Twonky as a running service will see this, and try to assign it as a client
If they are in the cache, if this is even held in the cache,
and they were not listed in the cache
Twonky would have to go read the clients.db
which would require it to access the disks, thus spinning them up

Or

If a client, such as a dekstop, has some sort of links to content via twonky
Is the very act of haveing links enumerated or something on the same idea
enough to cause twonky to go spin up the disks to get some sort of data

This is all just a guess

[phibertron]

Thnking about some more

What would happen if say the nas spun down the drives
And say I decided to go play a game on a game console such as the ps3 or xbox
wouldnt turning on the console in some way try to enourmate devies on the network via upnp
And in the case of twonky if it sees it would need to show the service
and that service needs and icon to be displayed on the ps3, the xbox it doesnt
that icon has to come from somewhere, im pretty sure it comes from the one of those jpg or png files
which if not cahced woud cause twonky to spin up the drives to go get that resource

[phibertron]

In some ways I also wonder if logging could be part of the problem
Is periodic logging from twonky part of the issue?

[phibertron]

This one is interesting, could it be the Mediafusion plugin

mediafusion-integration.plugin

Code: Select all

#Mediafusion Integration plugin Fetch every 60 Minutes the data from the mediafusion server. 
#(c) 2008 by PacketVideo
launch frequently: !60
exec: mediafusion-integration-plugin $dbdir -reload -keystore $keystore -lang $language 

If it had to write to the db to update things from mediafusion
It would have to spin up the drives every hour to do so to make changes or addtitions

[phibertron]

This one is also interesting, but not as frequent as the online stuff for mediafusion

auto-update.plugin

Code: Select all

#Mediafusion Integration plugin Fetch ervery 24 Hours the data from the mediafusion server. 
#(c) 2006 by TwonkyVision
launch frequently: !1440
exec: auto-update-plugin $dbdir -keystore $keystore -lang $language -inifile $ini_file -name $name -version $version -builddate $builddate -platform $platform -autoupdateinstall $autoupdateinstall -flavor $flavor

[phibertron]

I would also guess that any of the following
could in some way if enabled
play a part in making twonky want to spin up the drives

# -1 for evented, 0 for disabled, positive value for rescan time in minutes
scantime=0

# NMC mode (0:disable, 1:stationary, 2:mobiledirect, 3:mobileremote, 4:standalone)
nmcmode=0

# auto enable new detected clients
clientautoenable=1

# enable statistics
mediastatisticsenabled=0

# enable aggregation of other DLNA servers
aggregation=0

# default aggregation mode for new discovered servers (0:ignore, 1: aggregate, 2:mirror)
aggmode=0

# automatically install updates when available online
autoupdateinstall=0

[phibertron]

I started to look at the logfile, and I dont think that is the culprit
As by defaullt the verbose mode
Is only logging the startup of the service

I really really bet it is the Mediafusion plugin
To find out we could change the timer

from 60 minutes: launch frequently: !60
to 24 hours: launch frequently: !1440

[arnaudvre]

Hi phibertron,

Thanks for your posts, it's definitely not any other client because this is constantly reproducible with everything on my network except for my router shut down or disconnected and the router definitely doesn't have a media client of any sort on it.

Any idea how to disable the Mediafusion Integration plugin? Are there any potential side effects or consequences to disabling it?

I know the installation paths wouldn't necessarily be the same on QNAP to a normal Linux installation but just for an idea.

Thanks much

[phibertron]

Any idea how to disable the Mediafusion Integration plugin? Are there any potential side effects or consequences to disabling it?

The mediafusion plugin is used for the Media Feeds
Handpicked Video,PhotoBucket,Handpicked Radio,Flickr,Facebook Photos,Picasa Web,YouTube
If it is turned off then any updates to any of the listed services for media feeds
would not get any of the possible content changes

I know in the twonkymedia-server.ini there is setting to disable it
I would imagine that setting to 1 would do it

# disable creation of mediafusion account
disablemediafusion=1

I know the installation paths wouldn't necessarily be the same on QNAP to a normal Linux installation but just for an idea.

Where ever twonky is installed on the device there is probably /TwonkyMedia/plugins
In there should be a file called mediafusion-integration.plugin
The plugin is a text file you can edit launch frequently: !60

Note:
I think the above would be a quick sanity check for youself to find out
But, after further thinking about the issue
You will see frequent posts about people making note of the sleep problem
The things I have mentioned in this post are possible causes
But the one that I can't control is if twonky is somehow leaving an open handle to a file
which would prevent a device from sleeping

[phil-t]

I was just about to post some more detailed info from TwonkyServer running on Windows Server 2008R2, it might help, it might not being on a different platform.

Twonky was the only service causing my HDD to spin up, and even though it seems to be just about OK now, I'd like a more proactive approach from Twonky to deliberately make it easier to get Twonky suitable for 24/7 use with ultra-low-power considerations, it's a USP that would help sales, and it's brought up on many forums.

So, anyway, back to my installation..
I've installed Twonkyserver 6.0.32 on WS2008R2 SP1.

Luckily for Windows, MS themselves provide an App called ProcessMonitor that you can download from free, and this pretty much lets you monitor file access from any process..

I had the SCAN set to 0 (disabled) and unticked all Media feeds etc, just serving a single Music folder of MP3's..

OBSERVATION 1
What I find is, that at start up, and after any device has connected and streamed music, Twonky for 20-30minutes will be accessing C:\ProgramData\TwonkyMedia\DB,
The MS Process Monitor log shows

TwonkyMediaServer.exe 1352 CreateFile C:\ProgramData\TwonkyMedia\db
TwonkyMediaServer.exe 1352 QueryDirectory C:\ProgramData\TwonkyMedia\db\*
TwonkyMediaServer.exe 1352 QueryDirectory C:\ProgramData\TwonkyMedia\
TwonkyMediaServer.exe 1352 QueryDirectory C:\ProgramData\TwonkyMedia\db
TwonkyMediaServer.exe 1352 CloseFile C:\ProgramData\TwonkyMedia\db

When I told Twonky to Log, this is what Twonky is doing

[Trace] - LOG_SCAN: file_scanner : filescanner thread checking scan queue
[Trace] - LOG_SCAN: file_scanner : filescanner thread reading external import items
[Trace] - LOG_SCAN: file_scanner : filescanner thread checking plugins

Thoughts - It would seem odd why Twonky would keep 'polling' the 'queues' for so long after startup/each device access, it would seem logical to tweak the logic such that it checked for 60 seconds and stopped, this in itself keeps the minimum spin down time quite elongated (I have storage drives set to spin down after 10 mins).


OBSERVATION 2
I had to set "disablelocalssdp=1" for the drives to finally spin down, I believe this is to stop Twonky from 'discovering itself'.. some how it feedsback into itself (Could be that twonky sees itself as a source/renderer, I think it'll be obvious to the developers why this works).

So, now, after 30 mins or so, my HDD finally spins down,


CONCLUSION
As a developer myself (From embedded to windows), it would seem that
1. It's clear that just a few 'tweaks' would easily accomodate a growing userbase who are after ultra-low-power usage with NAS's and microservers etc
2. It would be nice if Twonky specifically made a small provision for this userbase, by allowing a default 'it will not access the HDD' setup made available while installing, and further to that, optimise with some small tweaks some of the features such that they don't need to access the HDD (e.g. caching plugins and other stuff into RAM at startup). It would be OK to have a global flag to allow people to choose if they want more RAM but less HDD access or vice-versa..
3. To then tweak the WEB GUI in such a way that if you have 'ultra-low-power' mode ticked (A global setting) that any items that will cause your HDD to spin up, to be highlighted in red of similar.

Being a developer, I know that my observations may not be 100% accurate, I'm hypothesising, but I'm sure it's along the right lines, and I know when not to tell people how to do things..

[phibertron]

Great observations

I did but did not forget about disablelocalssdp=1
That in itself is an intetesting setting/feature

My guess is that it used for things related to the following:
# NMC mode (0:disable, 1:stationary, 2:mobiledirect, 3:mobileremote, 4:standalone)
nmcmode=1

You know its kind of funny that you found that for you disablelocalssdp=1 helped the drives spin down
As earlier I had mentioned in this thread about the possibility
that clients could wake up the server and cause disk access
Almost forgot about the localhost and ssdp, which ya, would be the same thing as a client detection

[arnaudvre]

[quote="phibertron"]
The mediafusion plugin is used for the Media Feeds
Handpicked Video,PhotoBucket,Handpicked Radio,Flickr,Facebook Photos,Picasa Web,YouTube
[/quote]

and

[quote="phil-t"]
I had the SCAN set to 0 (disabled) and unticked all Media feeds etc, just serving a single Music folder of MP3's..
[/quote]


I have no option to enable or disable media feeds in the web GUI on the QNAP version of Twonky Server 6.0.30.

Interesting info on the files being accessed though, would be great to get some kind of Twonky dev input on the issue, Squeezbox Server is also enabled in my case for example and doesn't wake the disks until I pick up the squeezbox controller to play something.