***NEW*** 17-Nov: Beta 2.0.36 now available

chackett · Tue Dec 06, 2005 10:30 am

ksh wrote:
Thanks for that but still doesn't make any difference. I've tried searching for mention of a firmware upgrade but to no avail - any thoughts?

Cheers

Keith

Hi,

What I meant was, you may want to downgrade to 2.0.35 and then re-install 2.0.36. You'll have to use a CF card to downgrade the firmware.

When I first went from 2.0.35 to 2.0.36, I was seeing the same thing you did; turned out I was getting file transfer speeds that were so low they were almost unbelievable (see the 2nd page of this thread for details). What finally fixed it was downgrading to 2.0.35 using a CF card, and then re-upgrading to 2.0.36 using the network.

Have you tried measuring your transfer speeds? I bet they're really low.

ksh · Wed Dec 07, 2005 11:06 am

chackett wrote:
ksh wrote:
Thanks for that but still doesn't make any difference. I've tried searching for mention of a firmware upgrade but to no avail - any thoughts?

Cheers

Keith

Hi,

What I meant was, you may want to downgrade to 2.0.35 and then re-install 2.0.36. You'll have to use a CF card to downgrade the firmware.

When I first went from 2.0.35 to 2.0.36, I was seeing the same thing you did; turned out I was getting file transfer speeds that were so low they were almost unbelievable (see the 2nd page of this thread for details). What finally fixed it was downgrading to 2.0.35 using a CF card, and then re-upgrading to 2.0.36 using the network.

Have you tried measuring your transfer speeds? I bet they're really low.

What's the best way to measure the transfer speed then please?

Cheers

Keith

dgburns · Wed Dec 07, 2005 12:47 pm

ksh wrote:
What's the best way to measure the transfer speed then please?

telnet into the Roku, cd to the share in /tmp/Volumes, then do a timed copy.

time cp <filename> /dev/null

This will tell you how many minutes and seconds it took to move the bits from the source to the Roku across your LAN, of course without the Roku actually DOING anything with the bits other than sending to bitbucket. I'm not aware of any apps that you can run on the Roku to get an actual measurement like megabits per sec. Since my source is a Mandrake Linus machine, I can run the KDE network monitor app and it graphs instantaneous and average megabyte per second rates.

chackett · Wed Dec 07, 2005 2:31 pm

If you're going to do this, I'd start with a small file (0.1 MB) or it's going to take forever. And don't forget, of course, to multiply the file size in bytes by 8, since everyone here is quoting megabit per second speeds.

If you just want to get a rough idea, you can download MenuMeters for your Mac; one of the modules measures instantaneous network transfer speeds (in megabytes per second) and you can get a pretty quick idea how your transfer is going without waiting for the whole file to copy.

dgburns · Thu Dec 08, 2005 10:32 am

chackett wrote:
If you're going to do this, I'd start with a small file (0.1 MB) or it's going to take forever.

If you time such a small file, you're not going to exercise the ability of any part of the "system" to keep up.

chackett · Thu Dec 08, 2005 11:02 am

dgburns wrote:
chackett wrote:
If you're going to do this, I'd start with a small file (0.1 MB) or it's going to take forever.

If you time such a small file, you're not going to exercise the ability of any part of the "system" to keep up.

Normally, that's true; but when this happened to me, I was getting transfer rates of 0.1 Mbit/sec. From the symptoms that ksh described, it sounds to me like he's having the same problem I did when I initially upgraded to 2.0.36.

On the other hand, you're probably right; it would only take 8 sec to transfer a 0.1 MB file at 0.1 Mbit/s. That's definitely pushing it.

ksh · Thu Dec 08, 2005 11:18 am

chackett wrote:
dgburns wrote:
chackett wrote:
If you're going to do this, I'd start with a small file (0.1 MB) or it's going to take forever.

If you time such a small file, you're not going to exercise the ability of any part of the "system" to keep up.

Normally, that's true; but when this happened to me, I was getting transfer rates of 0.1 Mbit/sec. From the symptoms that ksh described, it sounds to me like he's having the same problem I did when I initially upgraded to 2.0.36.

On the other hand, you're probably right; it would only take 8 sec to transfer a 0.1 MB file at 0.1 Mbit/s. That's definitely pushing it.

3 secs for 4021105 bytes. That looks OK. Do you agreed?

However can't seem to downgrade the Roku from 2.0.36. Put 1.5.18 on CF card, hold power down, release, wait 5 minutes and up comes 2.0.36. argh...

TheEndless · Thu Dec 08, 2005 11:27 am

ksh wrote:
3 secs for 4021105 bytes. That looks OK. Do you agreed?

However can't seem to downgrade the Roku from 2.0.36. Put 1.5.18 on CF card, hold power down, release, wait 5 minutes and up comes 2.0.36. argh...

You need to make sure the file is named "formatup.rok" in order for it to up/downgrade. Rather than going all the way back to 1.5.18, though, why not roll-back to 2.0.34 (or 35) instead: http://www.rokulabs.com/developers/2.0.34/formatup.rok
That way you can use the network upgrade to go back 2.0.36 if you want rather than having to use the CF.

TheEndless

ksh · Fri Dec 09, 2005 3:05 am

TheEndless wrote:
ksh wrote:
3 secs for 4021105 bytes. That looks OK. Do you agreed?

However can't seem to downgrade the Roku from 2.0.36. Put 1.5.18 on CF card, hold power down, release, wait 5 minutes and up comes 2.0.36. argh...

You need to make sure the file is named "formatup.rok" in order for it to up/downgrade. Rather than going all the way back to 1.5.18, though, why not roll-back to 2.0.34 (or 35) instead: http://www.rokulabs.com/developers/2.0.34/formatup.rok
That way you can use the network upgrade to go back 2.0.36 if you want rather than having to use the CF.

TheEndless

Tried that - still doesn't work. When the Roku reboots with the CF card in place it takes around 5 minutes to boot (instead of instantly) but still doesn't load 2.0.34 off the card - still says 2.0.36.

# ls
Built-in CompactFlash
# cd C*
# ls
formatup.rok
# ls -l
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 15581184 Dec 9 08:57 formatup.rok
#

Tried executing it but that doesn't work either!

Cheers

Keith

chackett · Fri Dec 09, 2005 6:53 am

ksh wrote:
3 secs for 4021105 bytes. That looks OK. Do you agreed?

That's about 10 Mbps, which is a little low, but dgburns is right; if your transfer was only 3 secs, you're only getting a rough idea of what the actual transfer speed is. However, it's obviously not as abysmal as it was when I initially upgraded.

And follow TheEndless' advice on downgrading; go back to whatever you were running when you upgraded to 2.0.36.

dgburns · Sat Dec 10, 2005 12:19 am

ksh wrote:
3 secs for 4021105 bytes. That looks OK. Do you agreed?

Too small a transfer to really tell much.

Derail · Mon Dec 26, 2005 8:00 am

ksh wrote:
chackett wrote:
dgburns wrote:
chackett wrote:
If you're going to do this, I'd start with a small file (0.1 MB) or it's going to take forever.

If you time such a small file, you're not going to exercise the ability of any part of the "system" to keep up.

Normally, that's true; but when this happened to me, I was getting transfer rates of 0.1 Mbit/sec. From the symptoms that ksh described, it sounds to me like he's having the same problem I did when I initially upgraded to 2.0.36.

On the other hand, you're probably right; it would only take 8 sec to transfer a 0.1 MB file at 0.1 Mbit/s. That's definitely pushing it.

3 secs for 4021105 bytes. That looks OK. Do you agreed?

However can't seem to downgrade the Roku from 2.0.36. Put 1.5.18 on CF card, hold power down, release, wait 5 minutes and up comes 2.0.36. argh...

I too can't downgrade from this version. Any help would be appreciated.

ksh · Thu Jan 19, 2006 5:58 am

Finally got rid of 2.0.36. Found formatting the CF card seemed to helped. Downgraded to 1.5.18 using formatup.rok, then upgraded to 2.0.34 again using formatted CF and formatup.rok.

2.0.34 exibits none of the delay problems of 2.0.35 (about 10 seconds between songs) and 2.0.36 (about 5 minutes between songs). I suspect its whatever's been done to the SMB software. I have a PC running Fedora Core 4 and that can stream music using the SMB share without any delays.

Regards

Keith

chackett · Sat Mar 11, 2006 6:50 am

chackett wrote:
Aaaahhh, I forgot the first rule of computing: if it doesn't work the first time, reinstall it and try it again.

I downgraded to 2.0.35 and got transfer speeds of 16.67, 16.65, and 16.76 Mbps. Slower than most people, but at least it was stable.

I then re-upgraded (over the internet) to 2.0.36, and this time I got 24.95, 24.12, 24.0, and 24.61 Mbps. Again, not as fast as everyone else, but still a nice performance upgrade, and it's stable.

Thanks, RokuDave! And thanks again soiaf for your help.

OK, just in case there are any other Mac users out there who are struggling to get SMB transfer speeds which match their Windows or Unix brethren, I finally found something that works. I stumbled across a discussion of Samba for NSLU2 users:

http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/OpenSlu ... dWithSamba

which mentioned setting SO_SNDBUFF and SO_RCVBUF, in the smb.conf file on the server, to 65535 to maximize transfer speeds. I had mine at 4096, which is where I got the best speeds before (which were around 26-27 mbps). With these new settings, I'm reliably getting transfers of 30.8 mbps, and all of my stuttering HD streaming problems have disappeared. Yippee!!!

I'd still like to get NFS working, but at least this will keep the wife off of my back ("I can't believe you've spent all of this money and it still doesn't work right") while I sort it out.

rgwirtz · Sat Mar 11, 2006 9:55 pm

I've been trying to figure this out, so thanks for the tip, but could you walk me through how to do this? I open the smb.conf file with text edit? Then what do I do, add lines to format the buffer size? Sorry, I'm a linux newbie. Thanks.

NEW 17-Nov: Beta 2.0.36 now available

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