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Recently there have been a lot of users on my plex and the server just isn’t up to it anymore than 3 people and it stutters like fook.
now my budget would be tight so is there a pc setup I can add 4 or more drives that can handle plex better?
im looking at £300 max I know it’s not much but the boss would kill me as it is.
it would need to be cased and ready to go not adding bits here and there as I don’t have the time.
cheers guys.
TJ
Before ditching the kit have you considered a CPU and memory upgrade? Might work out cheaper
That's what I did with my GEN 8 and it seems to work a treat now with 8 users
or create optimised versions, that's if its a transcoding issue
First thing is to figure out what is your current bottleneck. I suspect it will be either internet bandwidth, CPU, or hard drive.
If you open up task manager (or even better, resource monitor) you can figure out if your CPU or hard drive is being overloaded.
Internet is a bit harder, the only sensible way I know is to get software that can monitor router using SNMP (easily found for free), but often cheap/domestic grade routers won't support SMNP which makes this method harder. You could look at network utilisation using task manager / resource monitor, but this will be only looking at your server NIC. Just for example one of your kids could be running bittorrent on one of their pc's 24/7 and you would never see this from the server, only from the router.
If it's CPU/RAM, maybe worth considering upgrades - when people starting talking about these microserver's I turned my nose at the idea when I realised how little CPU grunt they had.
If it's hard drive, then maybe time to consider moving the shared stuff to an SSD, or a RAID array (best to consider RAID 1, RAID 5 or RAID 6). If you go down the RAID route, software RAID is shite, and low end RAID cards are normally basically software RAID. Proper hardware accelerated RAID cards aren't cheap (unless you get them 2nd hand). From reading this forum, a few people seem to be big fans of UNRAID. I can't say I know too much about that except it seems to be an operating system as well as a software RAID version (that seems to perform better than regular software RAID). My personal opinion was that if it was that great, big businesses would have ditched their RAID cards to go to UNRAID, but I haven't tried it myself so I shouldn't really try to say which is better.
also what are the source files encoded in and what devices are trying to watch them ?, also have you updated the plex server software
Unfortunately the n54l has a soldered AMD chip and it is not really up to the task of transcoding for Plex, I was having trouble with one Plex client so seems like you've done well! I created a VM on my suped up Gen8 for PMS and then directed it to the media on my n40l which works fine.
The Gen8 is an awesome Microserver, better than the latest model IMO as it supports plenty of Intel procs whereas the latest is AMD again (and I believe soldered...). You may be able to pick a used one up cheap, or if not and you were just interested in a PMS/media host you may be able to build a PC for less and use more appropriate hardware. The Plex forums are good to work out what features the processor etc should have, I don't believe PMS can offload the transcoding to a GPU but may be wrong (I looked into adding a GPU to my n40l for this purpose but it wasn't possible).
God damn just wrote a massive reply and the site crashed. :(
So short version...
16gb ram and the cpu isn’t upgradeable.
Internet is 77mb/20mb
Plex always running latest build.
media files are mixed Xvid etc.
media there’s 12tb of it so ssd is a no go.
Plex is set to transcode max 2 streams but I see 3-4 streams running everyday?
Plex shouts cpu isn’t powerful enough to transcode stream if there’s more than 2 streams running.
I was hoping there was a tower pc that could run 4-5 streams out of the box when I installed plex.
If the £300 is burning a hole in your pocket then have a look at the Synology and QNAP NAS boxes. They both have native Plex apps. For £300 you will only get a bare box with no drives (unless you go second hand), so you may have to use your existing drives and upgrade later.
This might make for useful reading:
https://support.plex.tv/articles/115...ted-streaming/
transcoding uses a lot of CPU, idealy your media should be in MP4 H264 format with a stereo sound track you can create these with in plex server in the " optimised versions" section, as a lot of devices will direct play that, thus not needing transcoding,
for £300 quid I don't think your going to get a very good nas that will handel 4 ppl, esp if there all transcoding
What about trying to get a 2nd hand gen8 server?
I know someone local to me might be looking to sell his
(I’m not trying to broker a sale)
If he is I’d be happy to work it out and go via BST section etc
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if so please make a new post in that sectionQuote:
Originally Posted by jaygo