[PROBLEM] [PROBLEM] 9.x: MPD crashing ad-hoc / stops playing

[the_bertrum]

I've a particular interest in the xrun condition, having been affected by it for long time and believing myself to be the only person how saw it.  Since it didn't happen much to other people, I put it down to my own location (either my ISP, the wires to my house, or my home network) and developed a little script that would recover things for me when it happened (posted above).  Then other people came forward who also saw this issue, and Tim included the MPD restart stream monitor option based on a daemon that another user had developed to restart their stream when this happened.  I use the built in monitor now and it works very well.

There are a number of thing that come out of this discussion as I see it:

1. The xrun is not a problem in moOde, other users can run the same station and never see it, some stations will xrun predictably at specific points, people who see xruns will often have some stations that never see them, and so on.  The evidence points to it being a stream plus location issue, i.e either the stream is poor somehow, or the delivery to moOde is poor somehow, or both.  Diagnosing that is next to impossible and isn't a moOde issue anyhow.
   
2. The xrun condition affects other players on the same stream at the same location (There is evidence in this thread of a Naim system that didn't even try to recover).  Further evidence that this isn't a moOde problem.
   
3. Certain streams in this discussion have an abnormally frequent rate of the xrun condition at a particular location.
   
4. The stream monitor works.  When it is enabled, it restarts the stream effectively.
   
5. The stream monitor did have an issue where it might clash with the monitor that tried to detect MPD crashes, a situation Tim has fixed.
   
6. During the investigations, the system of Kurt1970 has managed to get in a state where the stream monitor no longer works.
   

So what to do?  First, a fresh install has been proposed.  That would ensure that there are no quirks left over from the diagnostic tinkering, and is expected to result in a system with a stream monitor that will restart successfully (note that Tim needed a specific set of monitor settings in his testing).
Secondly, assuming that the situation after the fresh installation still isn't satisfactory, replacing the MPD restart with a simple stop/start might help, it would avoid any conflict with the MPD monitor certainly.  This can be tested by turning off the stream monitor, and using the script I posted for a proof of concept.

So to summarise, the xrun is an issue, the xrun is not a moOde issue, moOde does have a mechanism to cope with xruns (unlike other players), the xrun recovery is no longer working for Kurt1970.  A fresh install should fix the xrun recovery, and there is an alternative to try if for some reason it still isn't happy.