Audio stutter during file transfers

[Eos]

Very recently, whenever I transfer a large file from any machine on the LAN to my main desktop, I'm getting stuttering of music playback during the file transfer.

The transfer rate is ~19 megabytes/s, according to Total Commander.

The music is stored on disk DIFFERENT than the file's destination disk.

The core load never gets above 20% usage.

In the Drives Meter image, I've seen the rate hit ~100MB/s. But it's varying during the transfer. Zero, then 40MB/s, then 8MB/s. then 50MB/s, and so on. The rate from the source machine is pretty consistent at ~19 megabytes/s.

MSI P67A-GD65 (B3) LGA 1155 Intel P67 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard
Intel Core i7-2600 Sandy Bridge 3.4GHz (3.8GHz Turbo Boost) LGA 1155 95W Quad-Core
2x G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10666)
Intel 320 Series SSDSA2CW120G3K5 2.5" 120GB SATA II MLC
Western Digital FALS 1TB Black
Intel PWLA8391GT 10/100/1000Mbps PCI PRO/1000 GT

Any thoughts on what's going on?

http://img849.imageshack.us/img849/1364/smartm.png
http://img856.imageshack.us/img856/171/meter01.png
http://img94.imageshack.us/img94/1756/meter02.png

 

[Puppies04]

What software is giving the bad playback?

 

[Eos]

What software is giving the bad playback?

It's Winamp. Let me check with WMP. Annnd same result.

Here's the details from my audio driver.

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/828/audioi.png

 

[Eos]

Interesting update: The stutter only occurs when data is incoming to that particular disk. The drive meter widget even shows utilization up to 100%, and music playback is absolutely fine.

So write to disk is difficult, but not the, uh, whatever it's called when data is sent off the disk. :whiste:

 

[Jeff7]

Did the problem just start, or is this a fairly fresh build?

Did you do anything with drivers for the motherboard or any of its onboard HDD controllers? Or network drivers?


Open up Task Manager and go to the Performance tab and see what your CPU's doing when transferring files. Back in the olden days of Win98, you'd see fairly high CPU usage when transferring files if you didn't have the right drivers installed and were stuck in PIO mode. I don't know if that's the case anymore with Windows 7 and SATA stuff.
I haven't gotten much troubleshooting experience with the newer hardware, as I'm afraid that the two LGA115x/Win-7 builds I've done thus far have gone without so much as a hiccup.

 

[sm625]

Your sound chip/card and LAN chip/card are probably sharing interrupts and the LAN is taking priority and not letting the audio driver refill the DAC FIFOs in time. Changing IRQ settings (for the sound card) would be the best fix. If you cant do that then you could try increasing your buffers inside your audio driver. I have not had to mess with manual interrupt settings on anything newer than XP yet whiste so I'm not the one to say how to do it. But I'm sure it can be done, somehow.

 

[Eos]

Did the problem just start, or is this a fairly fresh build?

Did you do anything with drivers for the motherboard or any of its onboard HDD controllers? Or network drivers?


Open up Task Manager and go to the Performance tab and see what your CPU's doing when transferring files. Back in the olden days of Win98, you'd see fairly high CPU usage when transferring files if you didn't have the right drivers installed and were stuck in PIO mode. I don't know if that's the case anymore with Windows 7 and SATA stuff.
I haven't gotten much troubleshooting experience with the newer hardware, as I'm afraid that the two LGA115x/Win-7 builds I've done thus far have gone without so much as a hiccup.

It's a brand new issue. The machine was built back in May.

When the stuttering occurs, CPU usage never goes above 30% on any of the cores, according to this CPU Usage widget I installed.

 

[Eos]

Your sound chip/card and LAN chip/card are probably sharing interrupts and the LAN is taking priority and not letting the audio driver refill the DAC FIFOs in time. Changing IRQ settings (for the sound card) would be the best fix. If you cant do that then you could try increasing your buffers inside your audio driver. I have not had to mess with manual interrupt settings on anything newer than XP yet whiste so I'm not the one to say how to do it. But I'm sure it can be done, somehow.

Could not find the buffer settings for this driver. Did find this, though:

http://helpdeskgeek.com/windows-vista-tips/manage-irq-settings-windows-vista-7/

Rebooted, and the stutter is still there.

Or did you mean another IRQ adjustment?

 

[Eos]

I contacted MSI for assistance, and they suggested I try transfers without any third party apps. So I moved the ethernet cable to the onboard LAN, and used Windows Explorer (yuck).

No stuttering...

Tried again with Total Commander, and again, no stuttering. les sigh

Why would the Intel nic function just fine for the seven months, and THEN start to malfunction? What a lame outcome.

 

[theevilsharpie]

Your NIC may be on it's way out.

One sign of hardware that is starting to fail is an excessive number of interrupt requests from the device, which can cause sudden inexplicable performance drops like the one you're witnessing.

You can check this out for yourself by using perfmon and watching the Processor\Interrupts/sec counter. A typical value for a desktop PC at idle is about 1,000 interrupts/second per core (i.e., a quad-core system would generate 4,000 interrupts/sec), with a somewhat higher value if the processor is under load. If the processor is attempting to communicate with a hardware device that is beginning to fail but ins't malfunctioning severely enough for the OS to disable it, the interrupts per second will be in the hundreds of thousands.