Problems with a smb mounted filesystem, mounted from a windows machine. Share used to play mp3s, and to play them constantly - once a file's done playing a new one is played. Worked fine on a box running debian woody (stable) on 2.4. But, after changing to a different box running Debian Sarge and 2.6 playback would skip now and then. And it seems pretty perodical, like every 10 or 20 minutes, so it could nearly be timed, just a few seconds off every time. So, it didn't seem random, but more like a timer or buffer or something creating the skips. Tried both smbfs and cifs under 2.6 - none worked.
Could you add your kernel version - if version 2.6.10 or later I would be surprised at problems in mp3 playback as you describe and would like more details. In particular if 2.6.10 or later kernel (or cifs version 1.28 or later) I would like to see contents of /proc/fs/cifs/DebugData after it skipped to see if the smb session crashed and any thing cifs related dumped to dmesg
I'm now using 2.4.28, but the problem is not so big as when I ran 2.6.x, but it's still there. I'm now using smbfs.
I want to confirm that this works fine on current 2.6. Which tool do use you to play mp3s (they likely use different buffering).
mpg321 I've also tried mpg123, but the same thing happens there.
I would not expect problems for this type of application beyond 2.6.12 or so. If old smbfs performs better to your server for this i/o pattern, setting rsize on the mount (rsize=4096) would mimic the i/o pattern that older smbfs uses.
Please reopen if you see similar problems on cifs versions later than cifs version 1.41 (backport to older kernels of cifs 1.45 is available on the download site).