Massive Xibo Client Data Usage

Hello,

I have opened a few other posts related to data usage on the clients. Well now I have a client that for some reason is sending a massive amount of data. In less than one week it has sent 11.8GB, and I have no idea why. The configuration is the same as the other kiosks.

This is costing a ton of money in data usage, so any help would be great. The download for this client does look correct, its just the sent that is crazy high. I am not seeing this on other clients, but I dont have network monitoring on all the clients, and I am worried it may be happening elsewhere.

Regards,
Nathan Rowe

What options do you have enabled? Statistics, periodic screenshots and notify current layout can all use significant bandwidth, and default to being off.

Also are these 1.8 series Players? If so, they use an internal webserver and access themselves over the network, so I wonder if somehow that’s throwing your statistics off? Does the CMS show similar bandwidth for the same Player?

Alex,

CMS does not show this type usage for the player. They are 1.7.9 clients pointed at a 1.7.9 server. Stats disabled, screenshots set to 0 disabled, notify current layout is also disabled. The display profile that is assigned to this user, is assigned to all 252 clients, and so far this is the only one I have seen this type data usage on.

I reinstalled the client last night after this post, and overnight it has only used 2.09 MB total, 440k sent, 1.66mb received. So why would a reinstall seem to fix the issue? The only thing I did different, was I installed ie8 to the client.

The way I installed the client on these plays was just a file copy of the install folder. I didn’t go through the installer on every device, because I didn’t have a way to script that, and I couldn’t find anything on this site about scripting the install. Still, the other 251 devices seem to be working fine, and they are all identical as far as the software and programs go.

Really puzzled by this usage.

Regards
Nathan

Given the CMS doesn’t show that bandwidth, I wonder if it’s an issue with whatever the software you’re using to gather those statistics is.

The CMS stores the raw size of each request to the bandwidth table on each connection, so it would show that kind of usage.

Well the other issue is the 4g network card was shut off by our ISP because of massive data usage. They reported about 12gb usage as well, so that matches up with what networx was showing.

Very puzzled, do you think not having IE8 or not installing from the installer could cause this?

Thanks
Nathan

Was the Player configured to show any web content, streaming video etc?

That may account for it.

I’m not aware that having IE8 installed or not would make any difference. We recommend IE11 being installed, and using the installer, since that ensures all the dependencies are met, and that the registry entries we recommend for best compatibility are set.

The player was running 3 videos in a loop. All the players are running this content, and this play is still running the same content after the reinstall last night.

All the clients have IE7 right now. They are old WinXP systems, and I didn’t upgrade them all to IE8 before sending the new Xibo folder out.

Do you have a silent installer so that I can test installing from the msi and not just dropping the folder with the new version? I don’t want to physically touch 252 kiosks, that’s why I deployed it the way I did in the first place.

Thanks
Nathan

I believe the standard MSI can do a silent install.

msiexec /i XiboPlayer.msi /qn

What if there is a version already installed? And how do you customize the install directory? For example, we have xibo installed at c:\xibo\ currently. How would we tell the installer to use that directory?

Thanks
Nathan

I’ve not tested it, but I believe this should work

msiexec /i XiboPlayer.msi APPDIR=“c:\xibo” /qn

I’ve no idea what it will do if there’s files in that location already. You’d have to try that yourself.

I will test and post back here. Thanks for the help.

I’ve had complaints from my hosting provider that I was using too many resources. And I only use 1 production client. Especially the MySQL request were over the limit. I can’t say anything about data, because I didn’t monitor that.

It was caused by the update interval on the client. The client was updating every 30 or 60 seconds (don’t know exactly how often).

When I changed that setting to once every 2 hours all my problems were solved.

I know this is probably a different problem than yours, but I just wanted to let You know,

1 Like

Thank you @Daniel_van_der_Geld for your input. I have increased the checking interval to 1 hour for my clients. However, I still don’t know why this one client, that is identical to 251 others, had this issue.

I will update if I find anything else out. I would think data usage is important to many users of this great product.

Regards,
Nathan

Hi Alex

Is there already a silence istall posibility for xibo 181?

You can do a silent installation as documented above…