I have a slew of music files on a server on our home network. Anyone who wants to play them can access them via NFS. Much of the time, though, there can be an insane length of time between requesting a file and when Audacious actually begins playback, i.e., the Audacious GUI shows "Buffering..." for as long as several minutes. Even for short tracks. Connections between most computers is gigabit speeds and everything running through gigabit switches. When I see this message, I can monitor network traffic and see virtually no intense traffic--or even brief spikes--while all this buffering is supposedly being done.

I've seen mention on other forums that the buffering settings in Audacious are useless for anything other than media accessed via HTTP. This seems to support the results that I've seen: tinkering with Audacious's buffering doesn't do anything.

I've tried increasing the read/write sizes in the NFS mount--up from 16384 to 262144--but haven't seen any improvement.

If what I've come across about Audacious and HTTP-connected media files is correct, what is actually taking place when Audacious says it's buffering? With the hardware between the media files and the player all being gigabit, my take is that there shouldn't be much of any buffering even needed and if there were a need, it shouldn't be taking anywhere near as long as I typically see.

It'd sure be nice to get any buffering down to the absolute minimum. The way things are working now makes some nifty features like cross-fading during song transitions, essentially, useless.

Ideas? Where should I be looking for causes?

TIA...

I'm not an Audacious user, but does the same thing happen when you run it with no plugins and themes enabled?

There are no "themes" that I'm aware of---just the GTK and Winamp interfaces. (I use the GTK interface; the Winamp interface is way too "squinty" for my eyes.) I disabled some plug-ins for music formats that a.) I'm not interested in and b.) can't imagine having to be dealing with. Response time is improved. Perhaps each plugin was getting involved whenever a new file was encountered with the idea that it should get involved in playback and each plugin waiting their turn and adding to the delay. Not sure what that's got to do with "buffering", though. Sure led me on a wild goose chase. We'll see things go for a day or so.