A few days ago, my wife complained to me that streaming video files from our home file server to her laptop stuttered and paused a lot. My first panicked thought was that that my switch from mirrored pairs in my ZFS configuration had degraded performance enough to cause problems.

Thinking about it a little more, I knew that couldn’t be the case – my streaming read and write speeds from the pool are usually around 22MiB/second. This was far faster than anything the video should need.

Last night, I figured it out. I was cooking dinner and listening to music streamed via AirTunes, which was having sudden and abrupt problems. The music was dropping out and skipping a lot – but the speakers attached to my computer kept on playing without a hitch. After a few minutes of poking about, I realized that my wife’s laptop backs itself up to a USB drive attached to our Airport Extreme, and it was in the middle of a backup. As soon as it finished, the music problems stopped as well.

So this leaves me with a new problem: when I get the television hooked into my home network I’m going to have to deal with quality of service issues to make sure the television gets enough bandwidth to play seamlessly. Either I’ll have to cache all the files on the media playback device , or I’ll have to set up a second wireless network, as there is no way to run ethernet cables out to the TV cabinet.