Video stutter using Kodi

[PDizzz]

Hello all-
I'm experiencing video stutter - video pauses for 4 or 5 seconds then races to catch up - using Kodi on a Mac Mini while viewing video files hosted on my FreeNAS drive. I'm not posting here because I necessarily think this is a problem with my FreeNAS server, I'm just starting here because the people on this forum tend to be smarter and more well-informed than the other places I could seek help.

The question is: How do I find the source of the stutter? Something wrong with my Mac Mini, Kodi software needing to be reconfigured, or something wrong with my network configuration.

Specs:
Mac mini (mid 2010) 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo 4GB DDR3
macOS 10.13.16 High Sierra
Kodi 17.6
FreeNAS 11.2
Supermicro X10SLL-F
i3-4170 3.7GHz
16GB ECC
smb share to my Mac Mini

 

[Apollo]

You should try using Netdata (under Services) to see if you are seeing anything that might be somehow suspicious.
In the first releases of 11.2 (Beta), there was some issues with Network and iocage causing some significant latency even network drops. This is no longer the case as far as I now.
It may not be related to your issue or setup though.
Are you accessing files through SMB with Kodi running on Mac?

 

[PDizzz]

The SMB share is a drive on my Mac. I point Kodi to this drive as its file library.

 

[Apollo]

Then you could use Netdata to monitor LAN activity, CPU, RAM and HDDread and Busy section.

 

[SweetAndLow]

Are you using WiFi? Run a network test like iperf to test your network speeds. Play the video outside of Kodi just over the smb share, this will either eliminate Kodi as the problem or prove its the problem.

 

[pschatz100]

You are only storing and serving files on your FreeNAS server, right? What is the format of the data on your FreeNAS server? What is the speed of your network connection? I would also check the memory and CPU utilization on each machine during playback to look for a possible bottleneck.

 

[HolyK]

Is it happening all the time or only time to time? (Either random or you see some pattern)?
You can try iperf (server on NAS, client on MAC) to measure your wifi throughput.
Check if ... ZFS Scrub, SMART Long-Test, Replication ... is running at that time?