HI guys,

Scenario: I am using my Asus WL-500G to play my music also i use a USB stick to store my files formatted with ext3. I use rsync to pull the mp3 files on to USB stick.

Problem: When my unit starts rsync process to pull down mp3 files, my audio freezes for few seconds and does this everytime rsync tries to write data on USB. Is there any solution for my problem? IS there any other solution so that my audio does not freezes while USB write I will really appreciate it.

Why using a usb stick for that? What about network audio streaming? Try a combination of mpd (it's in the ports) and one of his clients :-)

actually we have a script that downloads mp3 files on our client units from server and then we have another script that reads our playlist and plays out items on specific time. but its necessary to have mp3 files locally as network is not as reliable.

hi,

do you run rsync over ssh, or in some other way encrypted? I think this could be a problem because the encryption "eats up" your cpu-time.
Maybe you should try to reduce the maximum bandwidth of the rsync-connection   (--bwlimit=KBPS          limit I/O bandwidth; KBytes per second)
If it only limts the networkbandwidth the router will probably "freeze" at the beginning when rsync generates the file list, but it should be fine while syncing.
Or you should try to reduce the pirority of rsync (and the corresponding ssh process) but I'm not sure if renice  is available.

or you should run ssh as a daemon on you pc (mp3-source) because if you use "rsync://"-Address as source the traffic will be unencrypted, with reduces cpu-utilisation.
Or you should make a cronjob to sync you mp3s at a time when you are not listening to it.

Hi,
i appreciate about your ideas eleon216. But i tried all possible ways as i can. I have tried setting --bwlimit=100 also i gave low priority by renice command. I am using rsync command over ftp port and not ssh. I have even tried giving enough swap space to no avail. I guess i have only one option left to cronjob rsync process after listening hours.

But the thing is there are 800 units synchronizing mp3 files from our server, hence i cant use my server to perform rsync process to each and every unit. Also i am not sure whether all units will get synchronized out-of listening hours.

If i use Asus WL-HDD then i have no problem as it has HDD already installed in it. And HDD does enough caching to perform read and write operation with CPU overload.