DSM6, DSM7, Docker. Which server to use?

[Sandgorgon 5]

I have been using Emby on DSM6 (DS920+) for several years and it's been great. I'm looking to upgrade to DSM7, which will necessitate migrating Emby. I recently noticed there is a Docker image for Emby. I'm not overly familiar with Docker, but thought I might as well consider using this version instead of Emby if I'm going to be updating the server anyway.

Is there a performance or any other difference between the DSM7 and Docker versions of the server?

What are the considerations I should be aware of ?

Again, it's a standard DS920+ box.

Apologies if I've missed any key information or this has been covered elsewhere

Thanks 

[Luke 37116]

Hi, there isn't a performance difference that I'm aware of although the native Synology package is more tailored for the platform, so there is that to consider.

[Carlo 4330]

I was curious about this as well and using the .17 version tested both on my 920+ configured with 8GB RAM and no read/write cache.  I only did a few "wide open" tests to see what big differences I'd see.  For example I turned off transcode throttle and forced transcoding so I could see the fps.  I also did some downloads to see what bitrate I could download at.

It's was closer than I thought it would be but still a 3 to 5% difference.  However, when I kicked off a backup on another computer backing up to the Synology the difference were more like 6 to 8% as the latency was higher from Docker which makes sense as it's running in a NAT which is always going to add a bit of latency on it's own. I also setup Pihole running as a docker container and this to had a similar if not worse affect as the backup did.  When Pihole was active it's effecting the docker network.

I was obviously pushing things looking for differences which are there but in real-world use likely wouldn't be noticeable unless you're already on the border of a performance problem. In hind sight I should have tried recording a couple of DVR programs while watching one live but I didn't think of it at the time.

The setup to get Emby running in docker is a lot harder and will make figuring out security issues a bit trickier compared to a straight up point and click install.

Docker is great for complex setups that someone has already done much of the internal setup for you but in this case you just pile layers (disk, network, ports) on top of Emby making it harder to setup for remote use, GPU use, and file permissions.

Updates are going to be done differently with docker as well. I myself really don't see the point in using docker on Synology as it's not bringing you any advantages that are beneficial to serving up media or making it easy to administer.

Well actually I can see one advantage that could come into play and that would be not using /volume1/Emby (DSM6) and /volume1/@appdata/EmbyServer (DSM7) so you wouldn't have had an issue specifically with directory structures changes upgrading from DSM 6 to 7 but would still require upgrades to binaries I think so maybe a wash.
In either case having a backup of the Emby folder configuration would be protection against any outside changes of this nature.

That's my take on it after having tried it.

Carlo

[Bingo61 2]

i'm restartin NAS just now.

10 minutes

 

[Luke 37116]

@Bingo61 has this helped?