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Topic: Weird behaviour after hard-disc update (Read 4701 times) previous topic - next topic
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Weird behaviour after hard-disc update

Ladies and Gents,

I am a long-time happy f2k fan.

Recently I upgraded my system (windows 7, dell-pc) with a new external drive (fantec DB-ALU3-6G usb-box, Western Digital RED 6Tb hd) and since then, things driving me totally nuts: I am experiencing frequent glitches, ticks, short outages of the audio track.

I checked every imaginable part of the system. No result…

Non of the foobar parameters (thread priority, full-file buffering …) seem to have any effect on this.

Can anybody help me with a hint on where to search further?
Andreas

Weird behaviour after hard-disc update

Reply #1 –
Quote from: AH99 on
Recently I upgraded my system (windows 7, dell-pc) with a new external drive (fantec DB-ALU3-6G usb-box, Western Digital RED 6Tb hd) and since then, things driving me totally nuts: I am experiencing frequent glitches, ticks, short outages of the audio track.

Does it only happen when playing tracks from the external drive? Do you use an USB DAC?
... I live by long distance.

Weird behaviour after hard-disc update

Reply #2 –
Quote from: AH99 on
Ladies and Gents,

I am a long-time happy f2k fan.

Recently I upgraded my system (windows 7, dell-pc) with a new external drive (fantec DB-ALU3-6G usb-box, Western Digital RED 6Tb hd) and since then, things driving me totally nuts: I am experiencing frequent glitches, ticks, short outages of the audio track.

I checked every imaginable part of the system. No result…

Non of the foobar parameters (thread priority, full-file buffering …) seem to have any effect on this.

Can anybody help me with a hint on where to search further?
Andreas


Disable or remove your wifi card, use wired.
Disable the CPU throttling
Check your drivers.
Use LatencyMon to detect any other high latency drivers.

Weird behaviour after hard-disc update

Reply #3 –
Quote from: AH99 on
Ladies and Gents,

I am a long-time happy f2k fan.

Recently I upgraded my system (windows 7, dell-pc) with a new external drive (fantec DB-ALU3-6G usb-box, Western Digital RED 6Tb hd) and since then, things driving me totally nuts: I am experiencing frequent glitches, ticks, short outages of the audio track.


That sounds like data streamed to your DAC is dropping out, probably randomly.

This can happen when data paths inside your computer become overloaded or blocked.

Does removing the new hard drive remove the problem?

Is your old hard drive crapping out or nearly full?

This sounds like a "Straw that broke the camel's back" problem. The system might have been on the edge of failing, and the new hard drive added enough work to push the whole system over the edge.

Quote
I checked every imaginable part of the system. No result…

Non of the foobar parameters (thread priority, full-file buffering …) seem to have any effect on this.

Can anybody help me with a hint on where to search further?


The easiest thing to try first that might help is to test the new hard drive with the other USB ports.

Weird behaviour after hard-disc update

Reply #4 –
I would definitely check to see if you have the same problem with your boot drive.

Does this only happen with fb2k? Is WMP also affected in the same fashion?

If it's only due to the external drive, it could be due to a couple of different factors. The controller in the external enclosure could be at fault, but if it is indeed the enclosure, most likely it's something in the assembly going haywire (connectors, capacitors, etc.).

You might try running a checkdisk on the drive as well; extremely high capacity drives tend to have more platters inside, thus more moving parts and more heat generated.

Failing that, I once had a similar issue with a Seagate (or was it Samsung?) internal hard drive that would spin down extremely aggressively when playing mp3s. Due to the relatively small file size of mp3s much of a given song could fit inside of the hard drive RAM cache, leaving little to nothing being spooled off of the actual platter for a minute or more at a time. No doubt this behavior was to extend the lifespan of the unit, but it was also profoundly annoying.

Weird behaviour after hard-disc update

Reply #7 –
Probably a DPC problem caused by the USB driver. I'm having something similar with my realtek network card, as long as it's active, I'm getting random audio dropouts. Funnily enough, not on linux, so it's a purely windows problem.

Weird behaviour after hard-disc update

Reply #8 –
Quote from: ChronoSphere on
Probably a DPC problem caused by the USB driver.


Device drivers are always limited by the hardware they control. Of course they can cause problems of their own.

Quote
I'm having something similar with my Realtek network card, as long as it's active, I'm getting random audio dropouts. Funnily enough, not on linux, so it's a purely windows problem.


More likely than not, the Realtek network card is suffering from living in a bad neighborhood.

Most PCs have a number of USB ports, some based on 3 or more distinct & different hardware implementations. Their performance for audio, networking and hard drives can vary tremendously. 

Moving USB devices around among ports may be the 21st century version of moving cards around ISA and PCI slots during the previous century.

Inexpensive PCI  and PCI-E cards can be used to add more UDB ports  to desktops. Ditto for laptops that have similar expansion facitlities for USB-2 and USB-3. I've tried samples of both laptop and desktop expansion cards, and seen them work well. 

Done right, any of them can be very usable for audio, and done wrong all #$!! can break loose.

Weird behaviour after hard-disc update

Reply #9 –
The network card's neighborhood doesn't change when I boot to linux, yet the issue goes away completely. It's definitely a driver issue in my case and I could alleviate the problem somehow by disabling Green/Energy efficient ethernet options.

That doesn't really help in OP's case though.

Weird behaviour after hard-disc update

Reply #10 –
Quote from: ChronoSphere on
The network card's neighborhood doesn't change when I boot to linux, yet the issue goes away completely.


Just goes to show that if you change everything, everything changes.

It is not clear that the problem is the wifi driver or the audio driver, it could be either or neither.  The two entire IO subsystems are vastly different code with almost certainly vastly different design philosophies.  Besides, there is a chance that the equipment involved was unintentionally cherry picked to work well with one of the two OSs while the other OS may not have been as much of a priority.

Quote
It's definitely a driver issue in my case and I could alleviate the problem somehow by disabling Green/Energy efficient ethernet options.


In Windows since Vista changing power management for the ethernet adapter can be a simple matter of running the power applet in the control panel and checking some boxes on or off.  Directly relevant areas may include USB settings, PCI Express settings, and Wireless Adapter settings.

Weird behaviour after hard-disc update

Reply #11 –
The issue is high latency caused by DPC, which is a windows specific problem. It's the way microsoft made semi-realtime processing possible. Bad drivers cause many of those DPC to happen, stalling other, "non-realtime" processes. Also, as I've said, it's clearly a network driver issue, because if I disable the card (= it is not active), no interrupts happen. Also, it only started happening with win8.1, and was totally fine before. So yes, bad driver and Microsoft trying to make windows what it was not supposed to be doing (being a realtime OS).

This whole discussion is only tangent to the original topic, so let's leave it at that.

If it's an USB driver issue, though, AH99 can follow the instructions provided in the posts above to run the latency monitor and find out which driver is causing it.

Weird behaviour after hard-disc update

Reply #12 –
Quote from: ChronoSphere on
The issue is high latency caused by DPC, which is a windows specific problem.


Wow, is that the anti-Windows propaganda that passes for computer science wisdom these days?

Deferred Procedure Calls under a plethora of other names have been around as long as there have been multi-tasking operating systems.  IOW, the 1960s if we are talking about mainstream commercial operating systems.

Here's a question that if answered well leads to a (unfortunately OT in this thread) discussion that could shed a lot of light on the topic: If you don't have a mechanism like Deferred Procedure Calls, how do you implement multitasking?  Multiprocessing?

The cited Wikipedia article is badly written because it fails to expose the generality of the basic problem and the plethora of general solutions.

Here's a better written article from the same basic source: Wikipedia article on interrupt handling

Weird behaviour after hard-disc update

Reply #13 –
The mechanism itself may be necessary, but the implementation can certainly differ. I have never had a linux driver interrupt cause a delay that would cause audio dropouts so far, and I've been using staging (=low quality, known to have bugs) drivers for some of my devices in the past. So it's either the DPC implementation is more prone to errors, or windows drivers are badly coded overall.

And just FYI, I'm using windows 8.1 as my main OS as linux is far behind on what I need for daily use.

Weird behaviour after hard-disc update

Reply #14 –
Quote from: ChronoSphere on
The mechanism itself may be necessary, but the implementation can certainly differ. ...


Yes, ones might remember the Vista case ... .