Another Microserver user looking to upgrade

Conan257 · 27 Nov 2019 at 12:35

I've been running an N54L for a long time. It appears that i'm starting to struggle with CPU usage (mainly due to Plex), and considering how little I can spend to get a significant upgrade.

Setup:

N54L
16gb ram
120gb Cache
5x HDD totalling 14tb

System is running Unraid. It needs restarting twice a week due to Plex stealing all the resources and it not recovering itself. Sometimes I can restart just Plex, which fixes the problem for a few days.

If I'm just looking at a CPU, Motherboard and PSU upgrade (already have a case), would I get enough for an upgrade to make it worthwhile for £100 or so?

Avalon · 27 Nov 2019 at 15:39

Surely you are running Plex in a Docker? I have 4GB remote VPS boxes doing the same without issue, so why exactly is Plex stealing resources? Have you done something silly like enabled audio analysis or thumbnail generation? If the issue is transcoding then something like an M2000 will do everything except H265, probably want to think about the PSU side of things though.

If you do go down the dedicated build route, I generally find Ryzen offers the best general purpose build value, but if you have PlexPass, then intel iGPU is the most efficient game in town for transcoding, the bigger question should always be why are you transcoding? People often mistake poor media choice, poor client choice or poor connectivity as a reason to throw resources at a problem rather than fix the actual issue.

Conan257 · 27 Nov 2019 at 17:35

Yes, running Plex in a docker alongside another 8-10 dockers doing various things (the usual).

I've tried to solve Plex, but nothing concrete so far. Never set up transcoding, thumbnail generation is off... Not sure...

Avalon · 27 Nov 2019 at 18:11

Conan257 said:
Yes, running Plex in a docker alongside another 8-10 dockers doing various things (the usual).

I've tried to solve Plex, but nothing concrete so far. Never set up transcoding, thumbnail generation is off... Not sure...

Without any meaningful data on the other usage, I can only speculate, but a Pi3 or later can happily run PMS if clients direct play, so strictly from a Plex perspective, what you have should be capable. Have you installed Tautulli to review if your clients are transcoding at all? What’s the CPU usage looking like?

Audigex · 15 Dec 2019 at 23:32

If you're struggling with Plex it sounds like you're transcoding a lot... why not just convert your files to whatever format you're using?

I find that the vast majority of Plex users are using only one or maybe two streaming devices (eg an iPad and a couple of Fire TV sticks), so normally you can reduce your Plex CPU usage to almost zero simply by converting your files to the format that device needs

Conan257 · 16 Dec 2019 at 11:54

I don't think I was struggling with Plex as such, it just ended up sucking up lots of resources at a time when it wasn't meant to be doing anything, that I'm aware of....

Strangely, updating to the latest build of Unraid has solved all my issues and the system is running at around 20-30% CPU and RAM usage.... No reason for the issues before, but I've saved a bunch of money by keeping unraid updated!