I just changed transcoding to /temp folder and I can say that it makes difference. I have 16GB DDR3 1600 memory. Transcoding starts faster and seeking time is also much faster. I can actually play content through Firefox. That is something I was not being able to do before due to error you described before. Thanks for this tip
/dev/shm is nothing but implementation of traditional shared memory concept. It is an efficient means of passing data between programs. One program will create a memory portion, which other processes (if permitted) can access. This will result into speeding up things on Linux. TL;DR RAM
Jason you won't likely hit this limitation with 128GB, but to those who try this remember that the Plex Transcoder does a free space check before it begins to transcode. I believe it checks that free space is equal to the size of the file being transcoded + 10%. If you get random crashes after doing this, this is probably why.
I found a noticeable difference running the Plex folder on an SSD and the transcode folder on a RAM drive. The biggest plus is video tracking, it recovers much quicker to continue playback.
Good info. Thanks man. I added a RAM disk and passed it through to my PMS from Proxmox in just a few minutes. I didn't realize how many files were written during a transcode. Speed be damned, this has to help my SSD's longevity.
I've been using tmpfs for my Plex transcode target for a year or 2 now, and it works flawlessly, even on my mediocrely-powered gen8 HP Microserver. There's a caveat to this, though. You have 128GB RAM, so not a problem for you, but for everyone else who might be running on a more limited amount, if your tmpfs fills up during a transcode session, ALL streams will stop, with an error written to the log file saying it can't write the temporary files due to lack of disk space. Plex does NOT clean up until AFTER the transcode session has ended (to allow for faster seeks to areas it's already transcoded). This means that, if your tmpfs isn't large enough and you're transcoding to a format that will ultimately end up with a large amount of data generated (or you have multiple streams on the go), your (and all) stream(s) will stop when your /tmp fills up. It's at this point that your /tmp will be emptied, and you'll be able to restart the play/transcode session from where you left off. It's only a minor thing because it remembers where it stopped, but annoying nonetheless. Mine is set to 8GB (because I only have 16GB RAM in my machine) and this is adequate for most of my streams, but then a lot of what I watch is done via direct play, which doesn't seem to affect it as much. In other words, the more RAM you can spare for your tmpfs, the less likely you are to fill it up. But if you only have like 4/6GB RAM in your machine, you likely won't be able to allocate enough memory for a tmpfs location AND keep your machine from choking due to lack of available RAM.
Loz20365 not sure because I roll my own Linux servers and manage them manually. However, it should be as simple as viewing disk usage stats (as /tmp is a mount point like every other disk), wherever that might be. Or ssh to the machine itself and 'df - h' should tell you how big /tmp is.
Does direct play also bring the media on to the SSD? PLEASE TELL ME THIS. I want it to be like that so i can swipe through to different parts of the video easily. Scrubbing type benefits.
The way to get around this is to enable swap. That way if the ramdisk gets full, it'll offload to swap. First allocate your ramdisk to be larger than your available ram. So if you have 8gb ram and want to use 6gb for ramdisk, set your ramdisk to something like 32 or 64gb and ensure that swap is enabled on your system. Once the ramdisk fills up ram, it'll overflow to your swap file which should be located on a ssd preferably. This ensures that you can run multiple streams or larger 4k transcodes etc and not have issues aside from maybe overflowing to slower SSD or spinning disk swap.
I found this interesting. I use Plex as a VM on HyperV, server 2012. Standard spinning disks in Raid. Transcoding a bluray or switching transcoding modes (720, 480 etc) is almost instant maybe 2 seconds max. 5 seconds sounds kind of long when you're throwing as much power at is as you are. Cool experiment though, but seems unnecessary.
I also run Hyper-V Server 2012 R2, the best part about having Plex on a VM for me is I can back it up just by exporting it. Also If something happens in VM world it's easier to get it into another machine without having to reinstall everything. I can also control how big the hard drives and how much ram is available in the VM without physically removing any hardware. My Plex VM is 2 -- 2.4 Ghz processors with 6 cores each and running 12 Gb ram. My storage is a Synology NAS. I still have 4 cores each for other VMs and Main OS and 28 Gb of ram that can be used if need be. Currently I have been able to stream at home and away up to 8 streams without an issue.
SSD is a great storage media. The only issue is that it has limitations on how many times you can rewrite or re-strip the draw. Meanwhile, Ram is literally built to be cache for your system.
do you still happen to have the failed sandisk drive? i'd be curious if the sandisk software on windows could see just how much data had been written to the drive prior to failure...either way hope Zeus stays strong for you! P.S. do you have turbo boost enabled through the tips and tweaks plugin? that could give you a little bit of an uplift
they did a study on that with like 20 SSDs and stress tested them for 3 years non stop quite few of them did several Petabytes of reads and writes before dying. i think it was called an anvil test.
Samsung 850 Pro line, built with 3D V-NAND. Capacities include 128GB, 256GB, 512GB; and 1, 2, and 4TB. Samsung calculates the TBW by drive capacity. It offers a 10-year warranty if the writes are less than TBW maximums. 256 GB: 150 TBW 512 GB and 1 TB: 300 TBW 2 TB: 450 TBW 4 TB: 600 TBW So basically you got a dud SSD that failed no way you were even close to the expected life.
Luke Hodgkinson it does. It deletes right after the movie is done playing. I have 16GB total with a 9GB ramdisk, it doesn’t work well for me but it doesn’t fill up. It doesn’t work well for me because a 4K movie uses more than 9GB I guess because I can’t play 4K movies when I have the ramdisk option turned on
The other option is to use an Intel Optane drive for your transcode drive. (not the 16 or 32gb versions, but a 900p or 905p) I have a 900p 280gb version used for transcoding. Good thing is they are extremely fast and low latency due to being NVME and also they can handle extreme number of writes. Another option is an Intel P3700, which has a 5 year life span with over 17 drive writes per day.
I guess it doesnt make a difference in speed, but it make a difference in writes/reads on hdd. And i guess, more then one transcode could be faster on RAM.
A typical TBW figure for a 250 GB SSD lies between 60 and 150 terabytes written. That means, to get over a guaranteed TBW of 70, a user would have to write 190(!) GB daily over a period of one year. (In other words, to fill two-thirds of the SSD with new data every day). In a consumer environment, this is highly unlikely.
What was the capacity of your recently deceased SanDisk SSD? A higher capacity also helps a lot and ends up costing less in the long run than buying enough RAM. An MX500 2TB for $500? VS enough RAM for the job, yes please! Unless you already have enough RAM to put your temps in it without hurting performance of anything else.
I would have to disagree with the Sandisk comment. I have 12 1TB Sandisk Ultra II's running in a Ceph cluster, from which I run about 35 LXC and 3 QEMU instances. The drives in the cluster have been going strong for nearly 2 years now, and I also have another 1TB Sandisk Ultra II in a USB 3.1 external enclosure for transportable storage. I've had a great experience with Sandisk and recommend them when asked. They'll all eventually fail, but I expect it to be outside of the warranty period.
I had a 120 gig SanDisk SSD failed on me. It was used as storage for OwnCloud (Later switched to NextCloud) amd wasn't used that much. Granted the SSD came with my monitor purchase for free but still it shouldn't have died less than a year. So now all of my SSDs are Samsungs and not one of them failed. I guess since you are using the Ultra series probably made better.
Hey Jason! I know this is 3yrs ago but curious if this is holding up for the long term? Have you had any issues with ram failing or anything like that? Do you have any idea how much ram you typically use when watching or transcoding 4k bluerays? Does this help take off cpu load when watching 4k bluerays? I can play 4k fine but it runs my cpu around 50%....I'm wondering if running off of ram will reduce that some. Either way, I'd like to try this out.
Thanks for this. Had been on my mind for quite some time. I tried using Imdisk toolkit for windows. The results are not that apparent when compared with an SSD but very much if someone still using a disk drive. Also, definitely will not wear down the SSD. What size do you recommend by the way if you have say 4 concurrent streams all transcoding at default or high settings ? For a single usage I see the disk being used minimally.
Is this only good for transcoding streaming content or for synced content too? Where exactly synced content resides before it is being transferred to a mobile device? RAM or SSD?
i have a plex question you could try to tackle. I have multiple network adaptors, and plex (for remote uses) keeps defaulting to the wrong adapter, reporting the wrong IP address, which then doesn't work with port forwarding. Anyway in plex or in a INI file to manually point to a specific adapter?
how big does your Plex folder get? mine is easy over 150GB i think . assume its because off i have on does live timeline thumbnails etc. . also dual xeon being bottlenecks for the speed they run at ?
Would have liked to a control case to see what if anything bottlenecks the transcode. It would be interesting to see a regular hard drive vs usb hard drive vs ssd vs ram disk. Wonder if you could even produce a bottleneck. Can you do a video about the plex pass beta that has transcoding via intel quicksync? I would be super interested in how far you can get with that. I have been reading and it looks promising, I would love hardware transcoding on something like an 10W Pentium Processor J4205. If it works correctly this could transcode h.265 UHD better than most at only 10watts. Im a super nerd but would like to see some type of load balancing with virtual machines and live migration. Have a low powered server on all the time then when you do lots of transcoding the VM live migrates to a larger more powerful server.
I don't know anything about FreeNAS or UnRaid, but doesn't the path "/tmp" actually refer to a directory on your default Hard Drive on Unraid? I know I used to run Windows XP back in the day, and /tmp and /temp was an actual directory on the C: drive by default. I run Ubuntu Linux, and as far as I know, unless you create a RAMDisk or some type of virtual drive in RAM, you would most likely be using the temporary directory on your existing default hard drive. Just thinking out loud here...
/tmp I believe is stored in the ram. It will use half of the systems available ram to size the "temporary ramdisk". If you were to use /var/tmp you would be preserving data through boots & will write to the disk.
interesting question. I would say no. I also just got that 12GB version of the 2060, and already noticing massive performance boost while transcoding compared to my older 1060. I am eyeing up whether to chuck the transcoding to my ram or keep it in my cache SSD
I am running PMS on an NVIDIA Shield. I have had a couple of shows (from different networks) record audio only. They are not DRM channels. I thought it might be a transcoding problem but I can't find anything on the forums about it. Have you come across this issue and if so, any solutions? Thanks.
Does direct play also bring the media on to the SSD? PLEASE TELL ME THIS. I want it to be like that so i can swipe through to different parts of the video easily. Scrubbing type benefits.
Plex only performs better when you give it more CPU cores and threads...Ryzen 1700 is probably the best bang for your buck Plex server CPU...you could build a nice mini itx server with it and a nice NVME SSD as your SSD for transcodes...clock the CPU to 4ghz and you'll have a super powerful Plex server.
Just curious if you noticed any sustainable i crease in your light bill after firing up zeus? My friend says his bill went up $85 with his dual xeon server running... just wonxering how accurate this is
John Bob but im curious... is that under constant load? What if it sits idle mainly.... im new to server grade equipment, just as jason was prior to zeus
Also, do you think hdd spindle speeds could be a bottleneck? I mean sure SATA3 is like 6Gb/s, but thats from the hdd controller to mobo right? Surely a 7200 or 10k hdd would read faster?
Jason, side note. When trying to transcode 4k, my server practically laughed at me, and by server is no joke. Direct stream seems better, but what i noticed while testing is that there were just as many disk read/writes for that VM assuming it's the transcode folder.
if you were going to use a ssd, you wouldve been better to use a sas ssd at least it could handle the read and writes plus a awesome boost in performance
I don't get all the worry over transcoding etc.. my plex server is just a plain old 2012 2 core computer with 6 gigs of ddr2 ram and all my movies are 1080p, yet they stream perfectly fine to all 4 tv's in my house in full quality mode, no buffering, no lag, nothing, smooth sailing with no compressing or optimizing at all.
That's because it most likely is not transcoding and it's direct streaming. When you're not on the same network and you're watching something somewhere else ie. Work or your friends and family are streaming something. That's when you will run onto transcoding. Everything I watch and home direct streams as well. This is mainly for streaming stuff outside of your network. *Late reply to this I know, just happened to see your message.
yes i do think so, I have make the path and set the transcode folder in plex. But maybe there is something, I have to do in my settings. And my docker are a newer version @@robertt9342
Byte My Bits interesting way around it. Wish they allow us to remove in GUI or CLI as I paid for the software and like to have control over things like that.
What model of Sandisk SSD was it that failed? I know that they have several different levels of SSDs, some are more robust and faster than others, but I've never seen any of them considered crap drives.
Okay. But that doesn't answer my question about which model of Sandisk. I could see the bottom end SSD Plus wearing out fairly quickly, but the better models are actually quite good, especially the Extreme Pro and Ultra II.
How do you speed up direct play? I already have a 100 Mbit Network speed and everything plays directly. Cartoons aren't a problem but back to the Future is particularly big (8 Mbit/s) and it takes a few seconds to start playing. Is there a way to speed this up?
@@SimonZellox your cpu will be holding you back. And depending on how much storage you have, you may not have enough memory. Rule of thumb is is one GB of memory for every TB of storage anything less and you can see slowdowns in loading times as well as displaying the artwork.
@@bkpickell I have a 300 GB library and CPU usage is very low since I don't transcode. I also don't have problems loading the artwork at all and I have like 20 elements already
you're only gonna see a difference between SSD and Ram if your movie bitrate maxes out or exceeds the bandwidth of your SSD. Otherwise, your SSD will have no trouble providing the CPU (or GPU if hardware acceleration) with the file data for transcoding. So this was a pretty predictable result, though I guess it's more of a "just to make sure" kinda thing.
I don't know about their SATA SSDs, I've been using one of their micro SD cards in my phone for a few years listening to a few hours of podasts almost daily and have had no problems from it yet.
Interesting topic. I've been running unraid/plex for about 6 years using just an SSD but haven't switched to RAM as I only have 4gb in the box today. Is there a min. amount of RAM one should have for transcoding?
I just posted about this above, but tl;dr my tmpfs is 8GB (there's 16GB RAM in total in my machine) and is sufficient for most of my streams. The less RAM you have, the more likely your stream will stop/crash half way through due to lack of available space for Plex to store its temporary files, as it does not clean up until after the transcode session ends. With only 4GB of RAM in your box, I don't see a way you can make it work without choking your machine through lack of RAM AND keeping your transcode sessions from crashing half way through.
Dan Jones thanks. After seeing this vid I went out and bought 16gb :). Been having the same issue Jason had with streams stopping midway for no good reason.
Why this unraid thing is so popular? i made PMS with Tautulli management and openhab server (smart home controller) on ubuntu server 16.04. This windows like, click and done style is... If u do it yourself, u can learn something new. So... This heavily shared PMS with management took me 3 hours to be done. With OS Installation and mounting NFS shares for auto copy and auto backup :D ooh and to set up my smart home controller :)
What a stupid thing to do. You might wear out your ssd over time, but even replacing your transcode ssd every 3-4 years is way cheaper than overspeccing your plex server when it comes to ram.
IMO Plex Server should have a settings option to utilize all available RAM for transcoding/PVR playback.
Better yet instead of all ram you should be able to set a amount of ram used, then the PMS should fall back to drive if the ram becomes full.
I just changed transcoding to /temp folder and I can say that it makes difference. I have 16GB DDR3 1600 memory. Transcoding starts faster and seeking time is also much faster. I can actually play content through Firefox. That is something I was not being able to do before due to error you described before. Thanks for this tip
In Linux just use /dev/shm as your Transcode path under Server Settings. Done.
what is this directory? /dev/shm
What is this shm device?
/dev/shm is nothing but implementation of traditional shared memory concept. It is an efficient means of passing data between programs. One program will create a memory portion, which other processes (if permitted) can access. This will result into speeding up things on Linux.
TL;DR RAM
@@TheFilledk Thank you
Natty Wallo format c: and install a real OS
Jason you won't likely hit this limitation with 128GB, but to those who try this remember that the Plex Transcoder does a free space check before it begins to transcode. I believe it checks that free space is equal to the size of the file being transcoded + 10%. If you get random crashes after doing this, this is probably why.
I found a noticeable difference running the Plex folder on an SSD and the transcode folder on a RAM drive. The biggest plus is video tracking, it recovers much quicker to continue playback.
Good info. Thanks man. I added a RAM disk and passed it through to my PMS from Proxmox in just a few minutes. I didn't realize how many files were written during a transcode. Speed be damned, this has to help my SSD's longevity.
I've been using tmpfs for my Plex transcode target for a year or 2 now, and it works flawlessly, even on my mediocrely-powered gen8 HP Microserver.
There's a caveat to this, though. You have 128GB RAM, so not a problem for you, but for everyone else who might be running on a more limited amount, if your tmpfs fills up during a transcode session, ALL streams will stop, with an error written to the log file saying it can't write the temporary files due to lack of disk space. Plex does NOT clean up until AFTER the transcode session has ended (to allow for faster seeks to areas it's already transcoded). This means that, if your tmpfs isn't large enough and you're transcoding to a format that will ultimately end up with a large amount of data generated (or you have multiple streams on the go), your (and all) stream(s) will stop when your /tmp fills up. It's at this point that your /tmp will be emptied, and you'll be able to restart the play/transcode session from where you left off. It's only a minor thing because it remembers where it stopped, but annoying nonetheless.
Mine is set to 8GB (because I only have 16GB RAM in my machine) and this is adequate for most of my streams, but then a lot of what I watch is done via direct play, which doesn't seem to affect it as much. In other words, the more RAM you can spare for your tmpfs, the less likely you are to fill it up. But if you only have like 4/6GB RAM in your machine, you likely won't be able to allocate enough memory for a tmpfs location AND keep your machine from choking due to lack of available RAM.
Good info! Where can you see the size of tmpfs in unraid?
Loz20365 not sure because I roll my own Linux servers and manage them manually. However, it should be as simple as viewing disk usage stats (as /tmp is a mount point like every other disk), wherever that might be. Or ssh to the machine itself and 'df - h' should tell you how big /tmp is.
Does direct play also bring the media on to the SSD? PLEASE TELL ME THIS. I want it to be like that so i can swipe through to different parts of the video easily. Scrubbing type benefits.
The way to get around this is to enable swap. That way if the ramdisk gets full, it'll offload to swap. First allocate your ramdisk to be larger than your available ram. So if you have 8gb ram and want to use 6gb for ramdisk, set your ramdisk to something like 32 or 64gb and ensure that swap is enabled on your system. Once the ramdisk fills up ram, it'll overflow to your swap file which should be located on a ssd preferably. This ensures that you can run multiple streams or larger 4k transcodes etc and not have issues aside from maybe overflowing to slower SSD or spinning disk swap.
I found this interesting. I use Plex as a VM on HyperV, server 2012. Standard spinning disks in Raid. Transcoding a bluray or switching transcoding modes (720, 480 etc) is almost instant maybe 2 seconds max. 5 seconds sounds kind of long when you're throwing as much power at is as you are. Cool experiment though, but seems unnecessary.
Jacob I also have server 2012 running Plex. Just curious what the benefit is of running Plex inside the VM rather than just straight on the OS
I also run Hyper-V Server 2012 R2, the best part about having Plex on a VM for me is I can back it up just by exporting it. Also If something happens in VM world it's easier to get it into another machine without having to reinstall everything. I can also control how big the hard drives and how much ram is available in the VM without physically removing any hardware. My Plex VM is 2 -- 2.4 Ghz processors with 6 cores each and running 12 Gb ram. My storage is a Synology NAS. I still have 4 cores each for other VMs and Main OS and 28 Gb of ram that can be used if need be. Currently I have been able to stream at home and away up to 8 streams without an issue.
The correct way? Get unraid. Low cost, easy to maintain, cheap... no spinning up disks...
SSD is a great storage media. The only issue is that it has limitations on how many times you can rewrite or re-strip the draw.
Meanwhile, Ram is literally built to be cache for your system.
do you still happen to have the failed sandisk drive? i'd be curious if the sandisk software on windows could see just how much data had been written to the drive prior to failure...either way hope Zeus stays strong for you! P.S. do you have turbo boost enabled through the tips and tweaks plugin? that could give you a little bit of an uplift
Codeman20400 I had mine die recently. The controller on the ssd died so it wasn't recognised even in the bios. So I had no chance of recovery.
they did a study on that with like 20 SSDs and stress tested them for 3 years non stop quite few of them did several Petabytes of reads and writes before dying. i think it was called an anvil test.
channelofstuff Last forever is subjective. So long there’s no power outage, cosmic rays, or hardware failure. And yes ram can go bad
@@UnsungHeroist and you will lose zero data when that happens and will simply need to replace it. Can't say that about an ssd
@channelofstuff Not exactly. RAM is constantly re-written, and only last as long as the power...
Samsung 850 Pro line, built with 3D V-NAND. Capacities include 128GB, 256GB, 512GB; and 1, 2, and 4TB. Samsung calculates the TBW by drive capacity. It offers a 10-year warranty if the writes are less than TBW maximums.
256 GB: 150 TBW
512 GB and 1 TB: 300 TBW
2 TB: 450 TBW
4 TB: 600 TBW
So basically you got a dud SSD that failed no way you were even close to the expected life.
Hi Noob question when having this arrangement does the Ram self clear after transcodes completed/movie has stopped playing? so the Ram doesn't fill up
Luke Hodgkinson it does. It deletes right after the movie is done playing. I have 16GB total with a 9GB ramdisk, it doesn’t work well for me but it doesn’t fill up. It doesn’t work well for me because a 4K movie uses more than 9GB I guess because I can’t play 4K movies when I have the ramdisk option turned on
I never thought of this. You, sir, win today.
The other option is to use an Intel Optane drive for your transcode drive. (not the 16 or 32gb versions, but a 900p or 905p) I have a 900p 280gb version used for transcoding. Good thing is they are extremely fast and low latency due to being NVME and also they can handle extreme number of writes. Another option is an Intel P3700, which has a 5 year life span with over 17 drive writes per day.
Can you please do a freenas version of this ?
I thought I remembered them removing this as an option at one point in time. I have now swapped back! Thanks for the video :)
Popple2000 I also would like to know. I’ve read a topic on Plex/Unraid forum that it was not possible anymore. Can anyone explain?
I guess it doesnt make a difference in speed, but it make a difference in writes/reads on hdd. And i guess, more then one transcode could be faster on RAM.
A typical TBW figure for a 250 GB SSD lies between 60 and 150 terabytes written. That means, to get over a guaranteed TBW of 70, a user would have to write 190(!) GB daily over a period of one year. (In other words, to fill two-thirds of the SSD with new data every day). In a consumer environment, this is highly unlikely.
What was the capacity of your recently deceased SanDisk SSD? A higher capacity also helps a lot and ends up costing less in the long run than buying enough RAM. An MX500 2TB for $500? VS enough RAM for the job, yes please! Unless you already have enough RAM to put your temps in it without hurting performance of anything else.
I would have to disagree with the Sandisk comment. I have 12 1TB Sandisk Ultra II's running in a Ceph cluster, from which I run about 35 LXC and 3 QEMU instances. The drives in the cluster have been going strong for nearly 2 years now, and I also have another 1TB Sandisk Ultra II in a USB 3.1 external enclosure for transportable storage. I've had a great experience with Sandisk and recommend them when asked. They'll all eventually fail, but I expect it to be outside of the warranty period.
I had a 120 gig SanDisk SSD failed on me. It was used as storage for OwnCloud (Later switched to NextCloud) amd wasn't used that much. Granted the SSD came with my monitor purchase for free but still it shouldn't have died less than a year. So now all of my SSDs are Samsungs and not one of them failed. I guess since you are using the Ultra series probably made better.
Hey Jason! I know this is 3yrs ago but curious if this is holding up for the long term? Have you had any issues with ram failing or anything like that? Do you have any idea how much ram you typically use when watching or transcoding 4k bluerays? Does this help take off cpu load when watching 4k bluerays? I can play 4k fine but it runs my cpu around 50%....I'm wondering if running off of ram will reduce that some. Either way, I'd like to try this out.
Thanks for this. Had been on my mind for quite some time. I tried using Imdisk toolkit for windows. The results are not that apparent when compared with an SSD but very much if someone still using a disk drive. Also, definitely will not wear down the SSD. What size do you recommend by the way if you have say 4 concurrent streams all transcoding at default or high settings ? For a single usage I see the disk being used minimally.
Is this only good for transcoding streaming content or for synced content too? Where exactly synced content resides before it is being transferred to a mobile device? RAM or SSD?
i have a plex question you could try to tackle. I have multiple network adaptors, and plex (for remote uses) keeps defaulting to the wrong adapter, reporting the wrong IP address, which then doesn't work with port forwarding. Anyway in plex or in a INI file to manually point to a specific adapter?
128GB of Ram??!? GADZEUS !
how big does your Plex folder get? mine is easy over 150GB i think . assume its because off i have on does live timeline thumbnails etc. . also dual xeon being bottlenecks for the speed they run at ?
mines like 220gb i think. mostly timeline thumbs
Would have liked to a control case to see what if anything bottlenecks the transcode. It would be interesting to see a regular hard drive vs usb hard drive vs ssd vs ram disk. Wonder if you could even produce a bottleneck.
Can you do a video about the plex pass beta that has transcoding via intel quicksync? I would be super interested in how far you can get with that. I have been reading and it looks promising, I would love hardware transcoding on something like an 10W Pentium Processor J4205. If it works correctly this could transcode h.265 UHD better than most at only 10watts.
Im a super nerd but would like to see some type of load balancing with virtual machines and live migration. Have a low powered server on all the time then when you do lots of transcoding the VM live migrates to a larger more powerful server.
How many transcodes you can you run with this new setup before you run into a issue?
I don't know anything about FreeNAS or UnRaid, but doesn't the path "/tmp" actually refer to a directory on your default Hard Drive on Unraid? I know I used to run Windows XP back in the day, and /tmp and /temp was an actual directory on the C: drive by default.
I run Ubuntu Linux, and as far as I know, unless you create a RAMDisk or some type of virtual drive in RAM, you would most likely be using the temporary directory on your existing default hard drive. Just thinking out loud here...
/tmp I believe is stored in the ram. It will use half of the systems available ram to size the "temporary ramdisk". If you were to use /var/tmp you would be preserving data through boots & will write to the disk.
Not a Plex expert here so forgive if it is a dumb question but how about making a RAM drive on a USB flash drive? So much cheaper than some options.
Is there anyway to use the RAM on my GPU for temp transcode files? I have a RTX2060 with 12gb RAM
interesting question. I would say no. I also just got that 12GB version of the 2060, and already noticing massive performance boost while transcoding compared to my older 1060. I am eyeing up whether to chuck the transcoding to my ram or keep it in my cache SSD
I am running PMS on an NVIDIA Shield. I have had a couple of shows (from different networks) record audio only. They are not DRM channels. I thought it might be a transcoding problem but I can't find anything on the forums about it. Have you come across this issue and if so, any solutions? Thanks.
OK, so you are asking me to ignore my QM2 PCIe card in my QNAP NAS with 2x256GB M.2 NVMe and use the NAS RAM of 8GB? how can you justify this?
What is “enough RAM”?
ITs as relative as What is life. there is never enough of it.
Does direct play also bring the media on to the SSD? PLEASE TELL ME THIS. I want it to be like that so i can swipe through to different parts of the video easily. Scrubbing type benefits.
Plex only performs better when you give it more CPU cores and threads...Ryzen 1700 is probably the best bang for your buck Plex server CPU...you could build a nice mini itx server with it and a nice NVME SSD as your SSD for transcodes...clock the CPU to 4ghz and you'll have a super powerful Plex server.
Just curious if you noticed any sustainable i crease in your light bill after firing up zeus? My friend says his bill went up $85 with his dual xeon server running... just wonxering how accurate this is
James Harrison What you’re friend said about his bill is prob true. Dual xeons (especially older xeons) uses a lot of energy.
John Bob but im curious... is that under constant load? What if it sits idle mainly.... im new to server grade equipment, just as jason was prior to zeus
I never paid any attn to it, tbh lol
Also, do you think hdd spindle speeds could be a bottleneck? I mean sure SATA3 is like 6Gb/s, but thats from the hdd controller to mobo right? Surely a 7200 or 10k hdd would read faster?
How much ram did you use for the transcoding ram disk? I noticed that the disk can become full and then throw an error while trying to transcode.
Jason, side note. When trying to transcode 4k, my server practically laughed at me, and by server is no joke. Direct stream seems better, but what i noticed while testing is that there were just as many disk read/writes for that VM assuming it's the transcode folder.
Where do you get all the movie files to out on the server?
The CPU is going to bottleneck your transcoding... not memory or storage. No need to waste the SSD :)
Do you know how to change the live tv timeshift to ram?
Do you know how to change it on the mac pro.
Im using a mac pro 12 core 64GB ram 2012.
Anything.
My Samsung ssd 850 pro might not be fast enough for 4k transcoding.
if you were going to use a ssd, you wouldve been better to use a sas ssd at least it could handle the read and writes plus a awesome boost in performance
I don't get all the worry over transcoding etc.. my plex server is just a plain old 2012 2 core computer with 6 gigs of ddr2 ram and all my movies are 1080p, yet they stream perfectly fine to all 4 tv's in my house in full quality mode, no buffering, no lag, nothing, smooth sailing with no compressing or optimizing at all.
That's because it most likely is not transcoding and it's direct streaming. When you're not on the same network and you're watching something somewhere else ie. Work or your friends and family are streaming something. That's when you will run onto transcoding. Everything I watch and home direct streams as well. This is mainly for streaming stuff outside of your network.
*Late reply to this I know, just happened to see your message.
SerialAssassin and 5 months later I’m reading, he/she doesn’t understand direct play vs transcoding
Why even transcode at all, just stream the source. Then you are only reading the file and never writing data?
how much is enough RAM for Plex transcoding?
8 or 16gb
some of us run PLEX on ESXi!
Here
@@kevinp1514 Here
I'm about to do that.
Don't you have to make a ram drive
I can't not get my to plex docker to work (transcode in ram), which docker do you use? I use the one from plexinc, can this be the problem?
Plex inc on here. Did you set the path properly?
yes i do think so, I have make the path and set the transcode folder in plex. But maybe there is something, I have to do in my settings. And my docker are a newer version @@robertt9342
Can i do this on my mac mini?
Duncan Badenock yes
I'm just begining to gather the parts for my Plex server. Would 16gb be sufficient for RAM transcoding?
Get 32
16GB is enough my server for along time only had 8 and I never encountered an issue
Jason how did you remove the lime Tech logo and add you own. I run a few different machine and like that being the name. Not the logo let me know
u can change the graphics at the top, i did that and added my logo n stuff. then just blocked the original logo with my adblocker lol
Byte My Bits interesting way around it. Wish they allow us to remove in GUI or CLI as I paid for the software and like to have control over things like that.
yeah its kind of a back-asward way of doin it but I really only manage it from my main pc so I never see it the other way ;p
Why you need docker?
What model of Sandisk SSD was it that failed? I know that they have several different levels of SSDs, some are more robust and faster than others, but I've never seen any of them considered crap drives.
cee128d I had 4 San disk drive 2 failed without recovery so I pulled them all.
Okay. But that doesn't answer my question about which model of Sandisk. I could see the bottom end SSD Plus wearing out fairly quickly, but the better models are actually quite good, especially the Extreme Pro and Ultra II.
cee128d mine was Ultra II
That's fairly unusual.
How do you speed up direct play? I already have a 100 Mbit Network speed and everything plays directly. Cartoons aren't a problem but back to the Future is particularly big (8 Mbit/s) and it takes a few seconds to start playing. Is there a way to speed this up?
What cpu and memory are you using? Mine is painfully slow, but I know my server is ten years old and don't expect it to be fast.
@@bkpickell I use 4 GB of RAM and an AMD A4-3300m Apu.
@@SimonZellox your cpu will be holding you back. And depending on how much storage you have, you may not have enough memory. Rule of thumb is is one GB of memory for every TB of storage anything less and you can see slowdowns in loading times as well as displaying the artwork.
@@bkpickell I have a 300 GB library and CPU usage is very low since I don't transcode. I also don't have problems loading the artwork at all and I have like 20 elements already
Awesome video...once again....but....where was that Bud Light this time? 0:-) to calm the "recording nerves."
Drr2 ? I'm using ddr3 and it's much faster then my samsung ssd. Almost instant.
Dude where can I buy your shirt
Use /dev/shm
you're only gonna see a difference between SSD and Ram if your movie bitrate maxes out or exceeds the bandwidth of your SSD.
Otherwise, your SSD will have no trouble providing the CPU (or GPU if hardware acceleration) with the file data for transcoding.
So this was a pretty predictable result, though I guess it's more of a "just to make sure" kinda thing.
I can't imagine what content would do so. Raw footage from a 4k camera maybe. But that's not what plex designed to serve.
Sand disc is actually truly crap.
How would you know if you can't even spell it lmao
I don't know about their SATA SSDs, I've been using one of their micro SD cards in my phone for a few years listening to a few hours of podasts almost daily and have had no problems from it yet.
Ah man, you should put "Unraid" into your title, I thought it was a new Plex feature. Did you overprovision those SSDs to make them last longer?
Or just get some enterprise ssds from intel that are rated for 3-4 petabytes written a year...
This may be a silly question, but......
Are you not just wearing and tearing your RAM now? Instead of your SSD?
Lol
Everyone talks about Plex, but they ignore the better Universal Media Server. So bizarre
Interesting topic. I've been running unraid/plex for about 6 years using just an SSD but haven't switched to RAM as I only have 4gb in the box today. Is there a min. amount of RAM one should have for transcoding?
I just posted about this above, but tl;dr my tmpfs is 8GB (there's 16GB RAM in total in my machine) and is sufficient for most of my streams. The less RAM you have, the more likely your stream will stop/crash half way through due to lack of available space for Plex to store its temporary files, as it does not clean up until after the transcode session ends. With only 4GB of RAM in your box, I don't see a way you can make it work without choking your machine through lack of RAM AND keeping your transcode sessions from crashing half way through.
Dan Jones thanks. After seeing this vid I went out and bought 16gb :). Been having the same issue Jason had with streams stopping midway for no good reason.
Just added my 16gb to my unraid box today and set this up. Great post!
Why this unraid thing is so popular? i made PMS with Tautulli management and openhab server (smart home controller) on ubuntu server 16.04. This windows like, click and done style is... If u do it yourself, u can learn something new. So... This heavily shared PMS with management took me 3 hours to be done. With OS Installation and mounting NFS shares for auto copy and auto backup :D ooh and to set up my smart home controller :)
Seriously though, isn't raid just as fast, if not faster, than a SSD?
140 Mbps???? What is original?? Most of my stuff is Maxed out at 1080p around 7.6 Mbps.
What a stupid thing to do. You might wear out your ssd over time, but even replacing your transcode ssd every 3-4 years is way cheaper than overspeccing your plex server when it comes to ram.
108 view and only 9 like come on people support your TH-camr
He's right SanDisk is/can be crap, since I also had a SSD die after around a year.