My mini has become unusable as a media center (or anything else)

[stuntpope]

I bought a mac mini with the idea that it could be the backup server, file server and have it paired with the appleTV

Started out actually working: put an external 2TB drive on it to be timemachine backup 2 powerbooks, 1 airbook and an imac, AND had it streaming to the appleTV all over wifi.

Eventually, performance degraded, couldn't watch movies via itunes over appleTV and figured it was just too much over wifi and too much for the mini to handle.

So move the 2TB timemachine onto the airport.

Then run an ethernet cable from the mini the airport, connect appleTV from airport with ethernet.

So now, the ONLY thing the mini is doing is sending media via itunes to the appleTV AND it's doing it via ethernet, so this should be a no-brainer, right?

Wrong.

It's been going from bad to worse.

If you start playing a movie or a show (an mp4 that you import into itunes) you see the progress bar at the bottom as it copies the media to the appleTV (don't get me started...)...the media plays...If you pause it before the file progress finishes copying, itunes will hang. It will hang so badly (SBBOD) that either itunes will need to be restarted or the mini itself needs to be rebooted.

And this happens all the time.

Right now as I type this I've rebooted the mini and when I try to start itunes it goes straight into the SBBOD and just hangs.

I've upgraded to the latest version of itunes, I've run disk repair, cleaned out the trash, disconnected that external drive, shutdown all unnecessary services, this box basically does nothing other than this. So basically, it really does nothing, since it can't do this.

The mini is running Mac OS X Server v10.6.6, processor 2.53 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo with 4Gb RAM 1067 Mhz DDR3

When iTunes is hanging sometimes I can get a shell open and the uptime/CPU looks very low (0.2, 0.9) and the activity monitor doesn't show anything hogging the CPU, so I really don't know what to do.

The other thing I notice is that the mini just seems to be super slow at anything, like firing up safari after a reboot and loading an URL seemed to take over 30 seconds (but from the command line I get pretty fast ping times with no packet loss).

So the entire unit just seems to have severely degraded performance and is extremely slow in general.

What else can I do to debug this?

 

[smithrh]

Not sure what the problem might be, but I *can* tell you that I have a similar setup with an older Mac mini, except that it has 6TB of RAID attached to it, no performance issues at all.

Are you seeing anything in the Console logs?

 

[stuntpope]

Thanks for the reply. I'm seeing a lot of activity from jabberd trying to start up and shut down. I thought I saw that earlier and turned off jabber (I didn't think I'm actually using it for anything), but it looks like a lot of activity:

Feb 16 00:28:41 mini jabberd/s2s[3456]: starting up (interval=60, queue=60, keepalive=0, idle=86400)
Feb 16 00:28:41 mini jabberd/s2s[3456]: failed to load local SSL pemfile, SSL will not be available to peers
Feb 16 00:28:41 mini jabberd/s2s[3456]: attempting connection to router at 127.0.0.1, port=5347
Feb 16 00:28:41 mini jabberd/s2s[3456]: shutting down
Feb 16 00:28:41 mini jabberd/s2s[3456]: connection to router closed
Feb 16 00:28:47 mini org.jabber.jabberd[3450]: ERROR: sm died. Shutting down server.
Feb 16 00:28:47 mini com.apple.launchd[1] (org.jabber.jabberd): Throttling respawn: Will start in 5 seconds
Feb 16 00:28:52 mini jabberd/router[3460]: starting up
Feb 16 00:28:52 mini jabberd/router[3460]: loaded user table (1 users)
Feb 16 00:28:52 mini jabberd/router[3460]: loaded filters (7 rules)
Feb 16 00:28:52 mini jabberd/c2s[3461]: starting up
Feb 16 00:28:52 mini jabberd/s2s[3463]: starting up (interval=60, queue=60, keepalive=0, idle=86400)
Feb 16 00:28:52 mini jabberd/c2s[3461]: modules search path: /var/jabberd/modules/jabberd2
Feb 16 00:28:52 mini jabberd/c2s[3461]: initialized auth module 'sqlite'
Feb 16 00:28:52 mini jabberd/router[3460]: [127.0.0.1, port=5347] listening for incoming connections
Feb 16 00:28:52 mini jabberd/sm[3459]: starting up
Feb 16 00:28:52 mini jabberd/resolver[3458]: starting up
Feb 16 00:28:52 mini jabberd/sm[3459]: id: mini.local
Feb 16 00:28:52 mini jabberd/sm[3459]: sqlite: can't open database
Feb 16 00:28:52 mini jabberd/s2s[3463]: failed to load local SSL pemfile, SSL will not be available to peers
Feb 16 00:28:52 mini jabberd/sm[3459]: initialisation of storage driver 'sqlite' failed
Feb 16 00:28:52 mini jabberd/sm[3459]: failed to initialise one or more storage drivers, aborting
Feb 16 00:28:52 mini jabberd/c2s[3461]: [mini.local] configured; realm=mini.local, registration disabled
Feb 16 00:28:52 mini jabberd/router[3460]: shutting down
Feb 16 00:28:52 mini jabberd/resolver[3458]: attempting connection to router at 127.0.0.1, port=5347
Feb 16 00:28:52 mini jabberd/resolver[3458]: shutting down
Feb 16 00:28:52 mini jabberd/c2s[3461]: attempting connection to router at 127.0.0.1, port=5347
Feb 16 00:28:52 mini jabberd/c2s[3461]: shutting down
Feb 16 00:28:52 mini jabberd/s2s[3463]: attempting connection to router at 127.0.0.1, port=5347
Feb 16 00:28:52 mini jabberd/s2s[3463]: shutting down
Feb 16 00:28:52 mini jabberd/s2s[3463]: connection to router closed
Feb 16 00:28:57 mini org.jabber.jabberd[3457]: ERROR: sm died. Shutting down server.
Feb 16 00:28:57 mini com.apple.launchd[1] (org.jabber.jabberd): Throttling respawn: Will start in 5 seconds

 

[smithrh]

Are you seeing the console messages after you stopped jabber?

Also, how does your RAM usage look, any swapping?

 

[srexy]

Don't know if it works on OS-X server but have you tried running Onyx and the battery of tests it has?

 

[philipma1957]

Would you consider running it with snow leopard and not server osx?

 

[chenry]

I had a similar set-up, a Mac Mini 1.83GHz and a 160GB ATV. On the Mac Mini I had 4x 1TB LaCie FW disks storing all my movies and TV series.

I have the ATV set-up so that it copies nothing, just reads it straight from iTunes on the Mac Mini. Both are on the same gigabit switch.

This worked fine for a couple of years but I was running low on disk space so put the media onto an HP MicroServer in my office. On the Mac Mini I cleared out iTunes and pointed it to the media folders on the MicroServer (I didn't copy anything) and the ATV still gets the file across 3 switches with no problems.

I've a second ATV, a 40GB one, upstairs which is also paired with the Mac Mini and this uses Devolo Homeplug networking across a couple of switches, separate mains circuits and a couple of surge protectors (which they tell you not to do as it kills performance) and I can still watch 720p media with no stuttering. So I can't see where your performance problems are occurring, but it does seem network based.

If you were using wireless then I can see that it may not be fast enough, my wireless is awful it takes 2 hours to copy a 1.5GB file, i.e. a 45min 720p episode, so trying to watch it would take 2 hours (though you'd get plenty of comfort breaks).

But using Ethernet the file should copy much, much quicker, certainly less than the length of the film/TV episode you're watching. On gigabit it usually takes less than a minute to copy the file from my desktop to the MicroServer and that's across 4 switches.

How long does it take to copy the file from your 2TB disk connected to the Airport to your Mac Mini, not importing into iTunes, but to the local disk?

Colin

 

[Denarius]

Was just reading around and this looks like a similar complaint wrt jabber server here, with advice to rebuild its sqlite database. If you don't use Jabber server then it might be easiest just to turn it off

Generally though, have you taken it from the top, shut down all services that you use and add them back one at a time?

If it was working before then what changed? Any configuration changes? Power cut?

 

[smithrh]

Hopefully the OP comes back, but the 2 posts he made in this thread are his only posts on MR...