[davesdeadcat]

Hi,

I've been a very happy user of KODI for probably nearly 15 years now and for most of that time I've been using a NAS solution running a shared media DB with various KODI clients connecting (NVIDIA Shield, Amazon Fire TV, Windows & Mac).

The most recent few years I've been using a Synology with MariaDB as the DB and all worked perfectly fine until a recent upgrade. Like an idiot I left one of my NVIDIA shields to auto-update which took the app up to Matrix 19 which in turn upgraded all of the databases. Wanting to avoid corruption I manually upgraded all other devices. Seeing as I was now wasting most of my weekend I thought, oh well, might as get NAS upgrade out of the way too so upgraded DSM from 6->7 after only briefing reading up on various forums about how smooth those upgrades went.

Well, the inevitable obviously happened and now I have a semi broken KODI environment. All devices can, slowly, open up but the minute I click into a movie or tv show directory everything freezes for 10-20, sometimes 30 seconds. Then it comes back to life, same thing then happens when clicking into a season of a show, then same again happens when I click a file to play. However, once playing, everything is smooth including scanning forwards and backwards. The rest of the KODI menus seem fine too so I'm putting this down to an SMB or DB issue and wanted to ask for some help on how to narrow down whats causing this weird freezing.

I've tried a fresh install of KODI 18 on my windows machine and the issue is still there so its not OS specific and its not KODI version specific. Seems more like an issue with how KODI talks to DSM 7.0 from Synology. I've now since read a number of forum posts where DSM 7 has caused issues but most focus on NFS as the protocol with varying degrees of success in fixing it. My environment, mainly because its mixed client types, has always been SMB to keep cross platform a bit easier but not seen many other forums posts reporting the same issues. I did try manipulating my sources.xml & advancedsettings.xml briefly to flip my clean windows install over to NFS but no difference.

I have posted a debug log here to see if anyone can see anything that obviously jumps out: https://paste.kodi.tv/raw/dasepanuwi

I've also a support log with Synology and I'm now planning a disruptive downgrade of my NAS unless I can figure out a way to correct this. There are some KODI forum posts which talk about manipulating a few MariaDB flags to help with perf but I don't want to start down that road unless I can rule out a more basic issue first. 

Any pointers very much appreciated.

[gibxxi]

Hi,

I've been a very happy user of KODI for probably nearly 15 years now and for most of that time I've been using a NAS solution running a shared media DB with various KODI clients connecting (NVIDIA Shield, Amazon Fire TV, Windows & Mac).

The most recent few years I've been using a Synology with MariaDB as the DB and all worked perfectly fine until a recent upgrade. Like an idiot I left one of my NVIDIA shields to auto-update which took the app up to Matrix 19 which in turn upgraded all of the databases. Wanting to avoid corruption I manually upgraded all other devices. Seeing as I was now wasting most of my weekend I thought, oh well, might as get NAS upgrade out of the way too so upgraded DSM from 6->7 after only briefing reading up on various forums about how smooth those upgrades went.

Well, the inevitable obviously happened and now I have a semi broken KODI environment. All devices can, slowly, open up but the minute I click into a movie or tv show directory everything freezes for 10-20, sometimes 30 seconds. Then it comes back to life, same thing then happens when clicking into a season of a show, then same again happens when I click a file to play. However, once playing, everything is smooth including scanning forwards and backwards. The rest of the KODI menus seem fine too so I'm putting this down to an SMB or DB issue and wanted to ask for some help on how to narrow down whats causing this weird freezing.

I've tried a fresh install of KODI 18 on my windows machine and the issue is still there so its not OS specific and its not KODI version specific. Seems more like an issue with how KODI talks to DSM 7.0 from Synology. I've now since read a number of forum posts where DSM 7 has caused issues but most focus on NFS as the protocol with varying degrees of success in fixing it. My environment, mainly because its mixed client types, has always been SMB to keep cross platform a bit easier but not seen many other forums posts reporting the same issues. I did try manipulating my sources.xml & advancedsettings.xml briefly to flip my clean windows install over to NFS but no difference.

I have posted a debug log here to see if anyone can see anything that obviously jumps out: https://paste.kodi.tv/raw/dasepanuwi

I've also a support log with Synology and I'm now planning a disruptive downgrade of my NAS unless I can figure out a way to correct this. There are some KODI forum posts which talk about manipulating a few MariaDB flags to help with perf but I don't want to start down that road unless I can rule out a more basic issue first. 

Any pointers very much appreciated.

Just so you know, during a major version upgrade, Kodi does not 'replace' existing databases with new versions. It 'migrates' them to new versions, leaving the old ones intact as they would of been the last time you started Kodi 18.x. If you use an SQL client like HeidiSQL to connect to the MariaDB server, you will see two versions of each database (most likely), so you need not of panicked yourself into upgrading all your other systems to also be at Kodi 19. The other systems would of happily carried on using the old databases without issue as they'd of still been present alongside the new ones. In fact this *duplication* may have some bearing on the sudden loss of performance your experiencing, depending on the size of those (individual) databases and any remaining free space on the OS partition where they probably reside on the NAS.

Either way, you might want to check out THIS thread for performance-enhancement settings for your MariaDB server which *may* solve the issue (SSH access required). You can also check out another thread I posted some advice in with regards SQL backup / recovery in HeidiSQL that may be of use, based on personal experience. I also offered some advice on database engine usage (MyISAM vs. InnoDB) that may be relevant to the issues your experiencing, especially if your MariaDB install has been upgraded from v5 to v10 in DSM7 and is demanding more resources of the NAS as a result.

https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=360829

Dan / Gib.

[davesdeadcat]

Hi,

I've been a very happy user of KODI for probably nearly 15 years now and for most of that time I've been using a NAS solution running a shared media DB with various KODI clients connecting (NVIDIA Shield, Amazon Fire TV, Windows & Mac).

The most recent few years I've been using a Synology with MariaDB as the DB and all worked perfectly fine until a recent upgrade. Like an idiot I left one of my NVIDIA shields to auto-update which took the app up to Matrix 19 which in turn upgraded all of the databases. Wanting to avoid corruption I manually upgraded all other devices. Seeing as I was now wasting most of my weekend I thought, oh well, might as get NAS upgrade out of the way too so upgraded DSM from 6->7 after only briefing reading up on various forums about how smooth those upgrades went.

Well, the inevitable obviously happened and now I have a semi broken KODI environment. All devices can, slowly, open up but the minute I click into a movie or tv show directory everything freezes for 10-20, sometimes 30 seconds. Then it comes back to life, same thing then happens when clicking into a season of a show, then same again happens when I click a file to play. However, once playing, everything is smooth including scanning forwards and backwards. The rest of the KODI menus seem fine too so I'm putting this down to an SMB or DB issue and wanted to ask for some help on how to narrow down whats causing this weird freezing.

I've tried a fresh install of KODI 18 on my windows machine and the issue is still there so its not OS specific and its not KODI version specific. Seems more like an issue with how KODI talks to DSM 7.0 from Synology. I've now since read a number of forum posts where DSM 7 has caused issues but most focus on NFS as the protocol with varying degrees of success in fixing it. My environment, mainly because its mixed client types, has always been SMB to keep cross platform a bit easier but not seen many other forums posts reporting the same issues. I did try manipulating my sources.xml & advancedsettings.xml briefly to flip my clean windows install over to NFS but no difference.

I have posted a debug log here to see if anyone can see anything that obviously jumps out: https://paste.kodi.tv/raw/dasepanuwi

I've also a support log with Synology and I'm now planning a disruptive downgrade of my NAS unless I can figure out a way to correct this. There are some KODI forum posts which talk about manipulating a few MariaDB flags to help with perf but I don't want to start down that road unless I can rule out a more basic issue first. 

Any pointers very much appreciated.

Just so you know, during a major version upgrade, Kodi does not 'replace' existing databases with new versions. It 'migrates' them to new versions, leaving the old ones intact as they would of been the last time you started Kodi 18.x. If you use an SQL client like HeidiSQL to connect to the MariaDB server, you will see two versions of each database (most likely), so you need not of panicked yourself into upgrading all your other systems to also be at Kodi 19. The other systems would of happily carried on using the old databases without issue as they'd of still been present alongside the new ones. In fact this *duplication* may have some bearing on the sudden loss of performance your experiencing, depending on the size of those (individual) databases and any remaining free space on the OS partition where they probably reside on the NAS.

Either way, you might want to check out THIS thread for performance-enhancement settings for your MariaDB server which *may* solve the issue (SSH access required). You can also check out another thread I posted some advice in with regards SQL backup / recovery in HeidiSQL that may be of use, based on personal experience. I also offered some advice on database engine usage (MyISAM vs. InnoDB) that may be relevant to the issues your experiencing, especially if your MariaDB install has been upgraded from v5 to v10 in DSM7 and is demanding more resources of the NAS as a result.

https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=360829

Dan / Gib.

Thanks for the quick and detailed reply Dan.  I was aware that KODI upgrades just moved over to new instances of DB, when I connect with heidiSQL I can see about 8 DB versions through all the upgrades I've gone through. I did have one upgrade cause corruption in a much older version of KODI because I had one client using SMB and updating and another using NFS (my own fault in other words) so the whole thing got into a bit of a mess so I've just become a little conservative about keeping versions consistent when it comes to major releases at least. I've not looked into the InnoDB conversion stuff previously so thats something for me to read up on thanks.

The thing with perf is that its a DS918 synology with SSD cache, 8GB RAM as well as being 1Gb wired ethernet direct to router and it literally does nothing else whatsoever other than service KODI. So hosting/playing the media and running the mariaDB. Therefore, I don't expect there to any real constraints on perf.  Either DSM 7 has a broken SMB stack or the upgrade has exposed something in the way Kodi talks to an SMB server thats causes this pause/delay.

I've just looked at your thread on perf changes and tried adding my own CNF file. Unfortunately, even using your really helpful advice, it doesn't seem to have made any difference at all I'm afraid. Again, keeps me thinking along the lines that its an SMB issue or at least a timing problem with who KODI is addressing the DB itself or the way its probing for directory listings from the NAS. I've just re-tested after following your guidance and rebooting the NAS and the way the KODI outright freezes, even the debug log messages / CPU counters actually freeze, is just so weird.  

Hoping someone can point to a possible route to troubleshoot further. I'm now waiting on an additional external hard drive so I can dump all my data off the NAS before rebuilding it in case I can't resolve this before the weekend. Not sure how I can handle a house full of kids unable to watch their favourite cartoons/movie....

[gibxxi]

Hi,

I've been a very happy user of KODI for probably nearly 15 years now and for most of that time I've been using a NAS solution running a shared media DB with various KODI clients connecting (NVIDIA Shield, Amazon Fire TV, Windows & Mac).

The most recent few years I've been using a Synology with MariaDB as the DB and all worked perfectly fine until a recent upgrade. Like an idiot I left one of my NVIDIA shields to auto-update which took the app up to Matrix 19 which in turn upgraded all of the databases. Wanting to avoid corruption I manually upgraded all other devices. Seeing as I was now wasting most of my weekend I thought, oh well, might as get NAS upgrade out of the way too so upgraded DSM from 6->7 after only briefing reading up on various forums about how smooth those upgrades went.

Well, the inevitable obviously happened and now I have a semi broken KODI environment. All devices can, slowly, open up but the minute I click into a movie or tv show directory everything freezes for 10-20, sometimes 30 seconds. Then it comes back to life, same thing then happens when clicking into a season of a show, then same again happens when I click a file to play. However, once playing, everything is smooth including scanning forwards and backwards. The rest of the KODI menus seem fine too so I'm putting this down to an SMB or DB issue and wanted to ask for some help on how to narrow down whats causing this weird freezing.

I've tried a fresh install of KODI 18 on my windows machine and the issue is still there so its not OS specific and its not KODI version specific. Seems more like an issue with how KODI talks to DSM 7.0 from Synology. I've now since read a number of forum posts where DSM 7 has caused issues but most focus on NFS as the protocol with varying degrees of success in fixing it. My environment, mainly because its mixed client types, has always been SMB to keep cross platform a bit easier but not seen many other forums posts reporting the same issues. I did try manipulating my sources.xml & advancedsettings.xml briefly to flip my clean windows install over to NFS but no difference.

I have posted a debug log here to see if anyone can see anything that obviously jumps out: https://paste.kodi.tv/raw/dasepanuwi

I've also a support log with Synology and I'm now planning a disruptive downgrade of my NAS unless I can figure out a way to correct this. There are some KODI forum posts which talk about manipulating a few MariaDB flags to help with perf but I don't want to start down that road unless I can rule out a more basic issue first. 

Any pointers very much appreciated.

Just so you know, during a major version upgrade, Kodi does not 'replace' existing databases with new versions. It 'migrates' them to new versions, leaving the old ones intact as they would of been the last time you started Kodi 18.x. If you use an SQL client like HeidiSQL to connect to the MariaDB server, you will see two versions of each database (most likely), so you need not of panicked yourself into upgrading all your other systems to also be at Kodi 19. The other systems would of happily carried on using the old databases without issue as they'd of still been present alongside the new ones. In fact this *duplication* may have some bearing on the sudden loss of performance your experiencing, depending on the size of those (individual) databases and any remaining free space on the OS partition where they probably reside on the NAS.

Either way, you might want to check out THIS thread for performance-enhancement settings for your MariaDB server which *may* solve the issue (SSH access required). You can also check out another thread I posted some advice in with regards SQL backup / recovery in HeidiSQL that may be of use, based on personal experience. I also offered some advice on database engine usage (MyISAM vs. InnoDB) that may be relevant to the issues your experiencing, especially if your MariaDB install has been upgraded from v5 to v10 in DSM7 and is demanding more resources of the NAS as a result.

https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=360829

Dan / Gib.

Thanks for the quick and detailed reply Dan.  I was aware that KODI upgrades just moved over to new instances of DB, when I connect with heidiSQL I can see about 8 DB versions through all the upgrades I've gone through. I did have one upgrade cause corruption in a much older version of KODI because I had one client using SMB and updating and another using NFS (my own fault in other words) so the whole thing got into a bit of a mess so I've just become a little conservative about keeping versions consistent when it comes to major releases at least. I've not looked into the InnoDB conversion stuff previously so thats something for me to read up on thanks.

The thing with perf is that its a DS918 synology with SSD cache, 8GB RAM as well as being 1Gb wired ethernet direct to router and it literally does nothing else whatsoever other than service KODI. So hosting/playing the media and running the mariaDB. Therefore, I don't expect there to any real constraints on perf.  Either DSM 7 has a broken SMB stack or the upgrade has exposed something in the way Kodi talks to an SMB server thats causes this pause/delay.

I've just looked at your thread on perf changes and tried adding my own CNF file. Unfortunately, even using your really helpful advice, it doesn't seem to have made any difference at all I'm afraid. Again, keeps me thinking along the lines that its an SMB issue or at least a timing problem with who KODI is addressing the DB itself or the way its probing for directory listings from the NAS. I've just re-tested after following your guidance and rebooting the NAS and the way the KODI outright freezes, even the debug log messages / CPU counters actually freeze, is just so weird.  

Hoping someone can point to a possible route to troubleshoot further. I'm now waiting on an additional external hard drive so I can dump all my data off the NAS before rebuilding it in case I can't resolve this before the weekend. Not sure how I can handle a house full of kids unable to watch their favourite cartoons/movie....

Might be a HDD problem on the NAS. If you can scan the volume / share that house the databases on the NAS, I would do that. It's also likely that Synology NASes follow a similar idea in terms of partition layout to QNAPs (like mine). So the partition hosting the databases, and potentially the OS etc. WILL be limited in size. Most of the available space will be allocated to your shares, and the OS partition won't nessecarily be scaled up in size just because you have oodles of space. It depends where Synology puts the database files, but I would suspect it won't be in a standard share where an unsuspecting user might damage or delete the files by accident.

If you don't need the oldest DBs on the MariaDB server, I'd use HeidiSQL and dump them, and see if this yields any improvement. Also check the SMART status for the installed drives in DSM7 if your able. You could also try a re-flash / upgrade of the current firmware, as in my experience this can solve issues with system files being corrupt, depending on the severity. It just seems like too much of a coincidence that you have *multiple* DB versions, and the latest Kodi update seems to have ellicited all these performance woes for you. I'm running Kodi 19.3 on Windows 10 via 2x QNAP TS453 NASes, using MariaDB and am not experiencing any of the issues you describe.



Dan / Gib.

[davesdeadcat]

Just so you know, during a major version upgrade, Kodi does not 'replace' existing databases with new versions. It 'migrates' them to new versions, leaving the old ones intact as they would of been the last time you started Kodi 18.x. If you use an SQL client like HeidiSQL to connect to the MariaDB server, you will see two versions of each database (most likely), so you need not of panicked yourself into upgrading all your other systems to also be at Kodi 19. The other systems would of happily carried on using the old databases without issue as they'd of still been present alongside the new ones. In fact this *duplication* may have some bearing on the sudden loss of performance your experiencing, depending on the size of those (individual) databases and any remaining free space on the OS partition where they probably reside on the NAS.

Either way, you might want to check out THIS thread for performance-enhancement settings for your MariaDB server which *may* solve the issue (SSH access required). You can also check out another thread I posted some advice in with regards SQL backup / recovery in HeidiSQL that may be of use, based on personal experience. I also offered some advice on database engine usage (MyISAM vs. InnoDB) that may be relevant to the issues your experiencing, especially if your MariaDB install has been upgraded from v5 to v10 in DSM7 and is demanding more resources of the NAS as a result.

https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=360829

Dan / Gib.

Thanks for the quick and detailed reply Dan.  I was aware that KODI upgrades just moved over to new instances of DB, when I connect with heidiSQL I can see about 8 DB versions through all the upgrades I've gone through. I did have one upgrade cause corruption in a much older version of KODI because I had one client using SMB and updating and another using NFS (my own fault in other words) so the whole thing got into a bit of a mess so I've just become a little conservative about keeping versions consistent when it comes to major releases at least. I've not looked into the InnoDB conversion stuff previously so thats something for me to read up on thanks.

The thing with perf is that its a DS918 synology with SSD cache, 8GB RAM as well as being 1Gb wired ethernet direct to router and it literally does nothing else whatsoever other than service KODI. So hosting/playing the media and running the mariaDB. Therefore, I don't expect there to any real constraints on perf.  Either DSM 7 has a broken SMB stack or the upgrade has exposed something in the way Kodi talks to an SMB server thats causes this pause/delay.

I've just looked at your thread on perf changes and tried adding my own CNF file. Unfortunately, even using your really helpful advice, it doesn't seem to have made any difference at all I'm afraid. Again, keeps me thinking along the lines that its an SMB issue or at least a timing problem with who KODI is addressing the DB itself or the way its probing for directory listings from the NAS. I've just re-tested after following your guidance and rebooting the NAS and the way the KODI outright freezes, even the debug log messages / CPU counters actually freeze, is just so weird.  

Hoping someone can point to a possible route to troubleshoot further. I'm now waiting on an additional external hard drive so I can dump all my data off the NAS before rebuilding it in case I can't resolve this before the weekend. Not sure how I can handle a house full of kids unable to watch their favourite cartoons/movie....

Might be a HDD problem on the NAS. If you can scan the volume / share that house the databases on the NAS, I would do that. It's also likely that Synology NASes follow a similar idea in terms of partition layout to QNAPs (like mine). So the partition hosting the databases, and potentially the OS etc. WILL be limited in size. Most of the available space will be allocated to your shares, and the OS partition won't nessecarily be scaled up in size just because you have oodles of space. It depends where Synology puts the database files, but I would suspect it won't be in a standard share where an unsuspecting user might damage or delete the files by accident.

If you don't need the oldest DBs on the MariaDB server, I'd use HeidiSQL and dump them, and see if this yields any improvement. Also check the SMART status for the installed drives in DSM7 if your able. You could also try a re-flash / upgrade of the current firmware, as in my experience this can solve issues with system files being corrupt, depending on the severity. It just seems like too much of a coincidence that you have *multiple* DB versions, and the latest Kodi update seems to have ellicited all these performance woes for you. I'm running Kodi 19.3 on Windows 10 via 2x QNAP TS453 NASes, using MariaDB and am not experiencing any of the issues you describe.



Dan / Gib.

Thanks again for the suggestions Dan. I've gone in and dumped some of the oldest databases leaving just the most recent 2. No difference in perf.  Ran a few healthchecks and no issues either with drives or anything else. Synology performs perfectly well when reading & writing from a windows or Mac client with speeds running at 1Gbe line speed. So, its seeming more likely to be DSM7 issue thats changed something which Kodi doesn't like.

I'm in the process of backing up all my data onto external USB with the view to re-flashing back to DSM6 where Kodi 18 definitely worked fine and probably 19 too its just the timing of changing too many things at once like an amateur has bit me on the backside. I think I will try reloading the latest Synology firmware first though as you suggest. Support case with synology seems to be going along the "slopey shoulders" method of handling this pretty much blaming the MariaDB add-on and absolving themselves. We'll see. 

Pointers much appreciated.

[gibxxi]

Thanks for the quick and detailed reply Dan.  I was aware that KODI upgrades just moved over to new instances of DB, when I connect with heidiSQL I can see about 8 DB versions through all the upgrades I've gone through. I did have one upgrade cause corruption in a much older version of KODI because I had one client using SMB and updating and another using NFS (my own fault in other words) so the whole thing got into a bit of a mess so I've just become a little conservative about keeping versions consistent when it comes to major releases at least. I've not looked into the InnoDB conversion stuff previously so thats something for me to read up on thanks.

The thing with perf is that its a DS918 synology with SSD cache, 8GB RAM as well as being 1Gb wired ethernet direct to router and it literally does nothing else whatsoever other than service KODI. So hosting/playing the media and running the mariaDB. Therefore, I don't expect there to any real constraints on perf.  Either DSM 7 has a broken SMB stack or the upgrade has exposed something in the way Kodi talks to an SMB server thats causes this pause/delay.

I've just looked at your thread on perf changes and tried adding my own CNF file. Unfortunately, even using your really helpful advice, it doesn't seem to have made any difference at all I'm afraid. Again, keeps me thinking along the lines that its an SMB issue or at least a timing problem with who KODI is addressing the DB itself or the way its probing for directory listings from the NAS. I've just re-tested after following your guidance and rebooting the NAS and the way the KODI outright freezes, even the debug log messages / CPU counters actually freeze, is just so weird.  

Hoping someone can point to a possible route to troubleshoot further. I'm now waiting on an additional external hard drive so I can dump all my data off the NAS before rebuilding it in case I can't resolve this before the weekend. Not sure how I can handle a house full of kids unable to watch their favourite cartoons/movie....

Might be a HDD problem on the NAS. If you can scan the volume / share that house the databases on the NAS, I would do that. It's also likely that Synology NASes follow a similar idea in terms of partition layout to QNAPs (like mine). So the partition hosting the databases, and potentially the OS etc. WILL be limited in size. Most of the available space will be allocated to your shares, and the OS partition won't nessecarily be scaled up in size just because you have oodles of space. It depends where Synology puts the database files, but I would suspect it won't be in a standard share where an unsuspecting user might damage or delete the files by accident.

If you don't need the oldest DBs on the MariaDB server, I'd use HeidiSQL and dump them, and see if this yields any improvement. Also check the SMART status for the installed drives in DSM7 if your able. You could also try a re-flash / upgrade of the current firmware, as in my experience this can solve issues with system files being corrupt, depending on the severity. It just seems like too much of a coincidence that you have *multiple* DB versions, and the latest Kodi update seems to have ellicited all these performance woes for you. I'm running Kodi 19.3 on Windows 10 via 2x QNAP TS453 NASes, using MariaDB and am not experiencing any of the issues you describe.



Dan / Gib.

Thanks again for the suggestions Dan. I've gone in and dumped some of the oldest databases leaving just the most recent 2. No difference in perf.  Ran a few healthchecks and no issues either with drives or anything else. Synology performs perfectly well when reading & writing from a windows or Mac client with speeds running at 1Gbe line speed. So, its seeming more likely to be DSM7 issue thats changed something which Kodi doesn't like.

I'm in the process of backing up all my data onto external USB with the view to re-flashing back to DSM6 where Kodi 18 definitely worked fine and probably 19 too its just the timing of changing too many things at once like an amateur has bit me on the backside. I think I will try reloading the latest Synology firmware first though as you suggest. Support case with synology seems to be going along the "slopey shoulders" method of handling this pretty much blaming the MariaDB add-on and absolving themselves. We'll see. 

Pointers much appreciated.

No worries. QNAP's customer support and coding skills also leave a lot to be desired too, so I feel your pain. Hope you reach a satisfactory outcome.



Dan / Gib.

[DarrenHill]

Can you try connecting to the files via NFS rather than SMB?

I've got a Synology at home (1019+) running with DSM7 and MariaDB and it's working fine with Matrix.

The difference though is I'm using NFS to connect to my files rather than SMB, although they are available via both (I use SMB for Windows, but NFS for Kodi).

[davesdeadcat]

Can you try connecting to the files via NFS rather than SMB?

I've got a Synology at home (1019+) running with DSM7 and MariaDB and it's working fine with Matrix.

The difference though is I'm using NFS to connect to my files rather than SMB, although they are available via both (I use SMB for Windows, but NFS for Kodi).

Thanks for the suggestion DarrenHill. I did try flicking to NFS as a test but it made difference whatsoever. 
Manually mounting an SMB share (in windows) or an NFS export (from mac) works absolutely fine and perf completely fine. 

So there is just something specific to DSM7 & MariaDB it would seem from what I've been able to narrow down.
Synology support are throwing their heads in the air and blaming MariaDB and because its a "3rd party app" they don't seem interesting in even attempting to offer any troubleshooting steps.

[DarrenHill]

Which version of Mariadb are you running?

Mine is v10, which is the only one I can see for DSM7. But I recall that DSM6 had some earlier versions available too, which were removed during the upgrade.

It's not something I'm a great expert on unfortunately. All I can share is my experience which is it can/does work, at least on my set-up.

[davesdeadcat]

Just to close the loop on this issue, I've now successfully rolled back my Synology to DSM6 using this excellent guide :
https://www.blackvoid.club/dsm-7-to-dsm-6-downgrade/

After following Dan's tips on tweaking MariaDB (thanks again Dan) I now have a fully working and much snappier KODI setup. Queries and traversals between TV shows etc are much much quicker than before all this started so I'm happy now, although somewhat disappointed I couldn't get to the root of the problem. All KODI clients now running 19.3 and working fine so KODI itself doesn't seem to be the issue.

Only concern is that DSM6 is likely to go out of support some time in the next year or so and upgrading back to DSM7 is now something I'm going to avoid for as long as possible. 

Thanks for all the comments & suggestions.

[pkscout]

I haven't upgraded to DSM7 yet (waiting for DSM7.1 at a minimum), so take this suggestion with an entire bag of salt.  I run MariaDB in a docker container on my DSM6 setup, and I wonder if you'd have better luck with DSM7 if MariaDB was in a Docker container instead of using the Synology package.

[dpar]

Just to throw it out there, I'm running DSM 7 on my DS1819+ using MariaDB 10, and don't have any issues whatsoever. I've been running it this way since DSM 7 came out. I'm also using SMB. So I would assume you had some type of issue with the DSM upgrade initially?

Certainly no issues with the DSM 7/MariaDB/SMB combination in general. In fact if anything I would say performance seems better in DSM 7 vs DSM 6.

[gibxxi]

Just to close the loop on this issue, I've now successfully rolled back my Synology to DSM6 using this excellent guide :
https://www.blackvoid.club/dsm-7-to-dsm-6-downgrade/

After following Dan's tips on tweaking MariaDB (thanks again Dan) I now have a fully working and much snappier KODI setup. Queries and traversals between TV shows etc are much much quicker than before all this started so I'm happy now, although somewhat disappointed I couldn't get to the root of the problem. All KODI clients now running 19.3 and working fine so KODI itself doesn't seem to be the issue.

Only concern is that DSM6 is likely to go out of support some time in the next year or so and upgrading back to DSM7 is now something I'm going to avoid for as long as possible. 

Thanks for all the comments & suggestions.

Great to hear that your up and running again @davesdeadcat . I would advise you to keep an eye on your OS partition utilization going forwards, and keep Kodi database versions you keep on the MariaDB server to a maximum of 2 (One active, one old version).

You won't gain much by emptying the /TMP/ folder for example, as this is nailed-on to be a RAMdisk and will be cleared at reboot anyway. But do check the thing and make sure you've not been infected with some kind of malware, and that the add-ons you are running were installed by your good self, and are not causing issues in and of themselves. QNAP had a major security issue with ransomware a while back and a lot of people were affected. Thankfully I wasn't one of them, but proof if any were needed, that essentially, these NAS boxes are just 'computers' with a singular purpose (in the main), and can be compromised just as easily.

These NAS devices all run the same tricks to get to an end result. There maybe subtle differences between manufacturers in terms of the overall file system layout, but I know (having owned models by Netgear, Asustor and now QNAP) that none of these companies are going to go and re-invent the wheel. The 'innovation', if you can call it that, is leveraged elsewhere. So they all have the same advantages and pitfalls to a degree.

It's quite possible, that in Dave's case there wasn't enough remaining room on the OS partition to extract / process the firmware update properly for example, given the number of old databases he had on there. Remember, the amount of global space you have in terms of HDDs is irrelevant. The OS partition(s) will be of a set, limited size, and if filled will result in problems. It all appears via SSH as a single folder tree, but that's just massive amounts of symbolic linking hiding the true nature and layout of the partitions / volumes / drives from the end user, and to make things easier for the host OS to manage.

Dan / Gib.

[davesdeadcat]

Also running v10 of MariaDB. It had been upgraded from MariaDB v6 at some point in the past though but never had any issues until DSM7.

[davesdeadcat]

I haven't upgraded to DSM7 yet (waiting for DSM7.1 at a minimum), so take this suggestion with an entire bag of salt.  I run MariaDB in a docker container on my DSM6 setup, and I wonder if you'd have better luck with DSM7 if MariaDB was in a Docker container instead of using the Synology package.

That may well be an option for me going forward thanks. Something else to think about but I think I'll follow you other advice/comment and simply wait for DSM7.1 before attempting again.