FCP spinning wheel trying to playback material off the SAN

[Moe]

This might be more of an FCP related question, I'm not sure, but having a quite confusing situation

Setup :
Storenext based SAN, 3 linux and 3 OS X clients

Something strange started to happen, when they open projects in FCP, and press play, it gives rainbow spinning wheel for a very long time ( 5-15 minutes ) then plays back
once this long pause is gone, it plays back normal , scrubbing through the timeline as normal

While the wheel is spinning the following happens :
- no I/O happening on the Fibre switch ( Qlogic 5800 )
- Browsing the SAN through the finder works fine
- copying material from the SAN into local drives works fine
- using dd to write to the SAN works fine
- opening the same movies that's on FCP timeline from the finder in Quicktime works fine, multiple movies play at the same time

Linux clients are unaffected
Sharing the volume from one of the linux clients into OS X client using ethernet, the projects opens and plays back fine

it seems to be a pure FCP issue, but
if we copy this same material to local storage and open the project from it, there's no spinning wheel!

I'm suspecting either FCP or some strange network behavior causing FCP to timeout or wait for something for a long time

Running 10.6.3, Xsan 2.2.1, FCP 7.0.2 and QT 10.0, movies are Prores 422 HQ 2K

This behavior seems very random, a project that opens with a problem, could open again fine afterward and vice versa

Are there such known issues with FCP and fibre attached devices ?

did I mention confusing ?!

Any advice is appreciated

[lotte]

Hi Moe, what StorNext Veriosn are you using exactly? Remember to have at least 3.5.1 when running Xsan 2.2.1

Lotte

[Moe]

[bs3375]

This sounds eerily similar to a problem I ran into with a 100% Xsan environment. Not to scare you, but we ended up having to "nuke and pave" to get past the issue.

Do you know which version of 10.6.3 you're running? Version 1 or 1.1 (you can check build versions if you don't know-the one ending in 578 is the latter)?

Also, have you noticed the Finder being unable to display the contents of a previously unnavigated directory when the spinout happens?

One thing I wanted to try and never did was deleting all the .DS_Stores from the volume. If you're game the command is:

sudo find /Volumes/YourVolumeName -type f -name .DS_Store -exec rm -v "{}" \;

Good luck.

[lotte]

Hi Moe, I know that there´s a bit of confusion regarding the compatibility... I know that both, 3.5.1 and 3.5.2 on a Linux MDC work fine with Xsan 2.2.1 and 10.6.3.

Lotte

[Moe]

[bs3375]

Moe,
Are any of your storage pools set to use data with an affinity only?

Let me know. Thanks.

[Moe]

[Moe]

Ok, I think we found out the root cause of the problem, thanks to one smart editor

It turned out to be the cache amount available thumbnails!

Apparently they were running quite long form projects, that exceeded the default value for the available cache and memory, increased it solved the issue!

Looking at it now, it explains the randomness of the problem

A reminder for us all that a seemingly big problem could be caused by a very small thing, that's not SAN related at all

Thanks to everyone who tried to help

[polemanewru]

Moe, could You tell me what values You used?
I have the same issues as You described.
I'm sure this is not SAN related. I suspect this is memory issue, because opening compressor brings back FCP app (100%).

[slemon]

We set Still Cache 50% and Ram Cache 2048K

After changing values,,everything's fine!~

But, I don't know exact value!...

[Moe]

[keithkoby]

We started to see this problem after we upgraded to snow leopard earlier this year. It only occurs on certain types of long form projects. Not all long form projects.

We have left 3 computers on leopard for the time being so that the editors involved can continue working without the beachballing while we look for answers.

Increasing the cache and ram settings hasn't helped. I don't believe that 2.2.2 helped nor the 10.6.8 updates. Occasionally we have duplicated a project file and opened the copy to find that it works. IIRC, that copied file eventually has issues as well.

Out of curiosity, can you tell me where the project files are saved? Are they on an AFP share or on the san? Do you work on the project files locally?

[wrstuden]

You might also check file fragmentation levels. If the files are fragmented, you have extra impetus to move to Xsan 2.2.2.

[keithkoby]

This still isn't fully solved, but we might have made progress. Question for those still monitoring and who saw the symptoms, what type of storage or mix of storage and switch did you have?

Keith