Can I add a SSD to my FreeNAS server for Emby Cache and Transcoding temp files?

[pclausen 41]

I'm curious if it is possible to add a SSD and tell Emby to use it for the Cache and temp transcoding files?

 

I know by default, these are the paths for those guys:

 

/var/db/emby-server/cache

/var/db/emby-server/transcoding-temp

 

Thanks

[sluggo45 47]

Sure, you can add most any storage device you want to FreeNas, set up a storage pool on it, and then attach said pool to the jail Emby runs in. Then it'll just show up as a local path in the plugin and you can point Emby to that.

 

The how-to of this, should you not know, is a bit outside the scope of this forum, you'd get better support on the FreeNas forums/reading the storage section of the docs

 

The real question though is do you want to do this at all? You aren't going to see much of a performance benefit simply by slapping an SSD in for this. You'd be better off putting all your jails, including Emby, on an SSD and have them access your spinning disk drive pools in the reverse of what I described above. That's what I do.

 

If you do this, make sure to set up snapshots for your jails then replicate them over to another storage device so you're protected in case the ssd goes bad (you can mirror/etc. it too but that is kind of a waste, really, just snapshot/replicate). 

[pclausen 41]

Ah that makes perfect sense.  Especially your 2nd suggestion.  That's what I'll do.  Thanks!

[scharbag 15]

Second that!  Exactly how I run Emby on FreeNAS.  Works Great.

[NASbeginner 0]

Hi guys - first time poster here! I seem to be in similiar shoes as pclausen. I'm looking at setting up a FreeNAS NAS system so I can copy my DVDs to it for long-term storage/safe keeping wiht the ability to stream to on multiple platforms. Emby seems like a great option and wondering if this is a better option than Plex. I posted about this over at FreeNAS and Plex seems to be popular there but I'd love t get your comments thoughts on Emby since you are current users, and also FreeNAS NAS users as well (?). I'm trying to do a lot of research right now so I can have a plan for how to implement a proper home theater/NAS setup

 

I am confused about the jails, as I asked about this at FreeNAS about why not run all programs like Plex, Emby, etc. on an SSD and then use the storage HDDs just for your files. I was told to keep it simple and install them on jails on the HDDs, however what I was thinking seems to be what you are thinking as well about having them run on SSDs instead. Is this a better option than creating the jail to run Emby right on a storage HDD?

 

Thank you, and I look forward to discussing this with all of you in this thread, whether in this thread or other threads on this forum

[josh4trunks 70]

I don't think there's an absolutely better option in this case. to add more options you could add your ssd to your main pool as a cache or zil drive.

 

also saying Emby or plex is better is an opinion. I prefer Emby because it's open source so I have the ability to contribute to it.

[pclausen 41]

I ended up not pursuing adding a SSD for my Jails since my pool HDDs are able to be read/written, to at about 1.5GB/sec, which is already faster than a singe or even a pair of SSDs in RAID0.  Latency is probably higher with the HDDs, but at the end of the day, I don't think I would achieve any noticeable gains.  About the only annoying delay I have, is when I open the Movie Poster Wall from the web browser interface.  It takes about 10 seconds before the first page of 500 movies (out of about 2,400) is displayed.  If the Emby cache could use RAM, instead of SSD or HDD, that would really speed things up I think.

[josh4trunks 70]

I ended up not pursuing adding a SSD for my Jails since my pool HDDs are able to be read/written, to at about 1.5GB/sec, which is already faster than a singe or even a pair of SSDs in RAID0. Latency is probably higher with the HDDs, but at the end of the day, I don't think I would achieve any noticeable gains. About the only annoying delay I have, is when I open the Movie Poster Wall from the web browser interface. It takes about 10 seconds before the first page of 500 movies (out of about 2,400) is displayed. If the Emby cache could use RAM, instead of SSD or HDD, that would really speed things up I think.

that's really fast, I kinda doubt that speed unless you have a ton of spindles. maybe that's the initial speed because your hitting zfs's cache. (I could be reading this wrong, I'm assuming you mean gigabytes by the capital GB)

 

as for using RAM for your posters, if you have excess RAM zfs will put the most read blocks in its ARC (RAM).

Edited November 17, 2015 by josh4trunks

[pclausen 41]

I got 50 spindles.  5 raidz2 vdevs with 10 spindles in each.  

 

[root@argon] ~# dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/v1/misc/foofile bs=1048576
load: 5.68  cmd: dd 26184 [running] 11.02r 0.01u 8.02s 39% 2624k
17339252736 bytes transferred in 10.982776 secs (1578767743 bytes/sec)
load: 4.23  cmd: dd 26184 [dmu_tx_delay] 95.26r 0.14u 47.34s 25% 2624k
133439684608 bytes transferred in 95.222746 secs (1401342537 bytes/sec)
load: 3.66  cmd: dd 26184 [dmu_tx_delay] 515.73r 0.63u 232.75s 23% 2624k
694745563136 bytes transferred in 515.693642 secs (1347205989 bytes/sec)
load: 3.84  cmd: dd 26184 [dmu_tx_delay] 976.99r 1.12u 428.79s 17% 2624k
1277145645056 bytes transferred in 976.949585 secs (1307278968 bytes/sec)
load: 6.31  cmd: dd 26184 [running] 1498.13r 1.69u 644.36s 23% 2624k
1914715504640 bytes transferred in 1498.091036 secs (1278103572 bytes/sec)
6055083900928 bytes transferred in 5115.036750 secs (1183781114 bytes/sec)

So it drops to about 1.2 GB/sec after 1.5 hours.  And yes, I did turn off compression before the test.

 

I got 64Gb of RAM, so I wonder why it takes 10 seconds to load the movie poster wall.  If I go to say the TV Series and then back to Movies, it takes 10 seconds again to load.

 

That foofile got pretty large after that run and FreeNAS gave me a warning that I was at 80% utilization on my pool.  

Edited November 17, 2015 by pclausen

[josh4trunks 70]

ohh wow, what a monster. hmm, maybe the poster loading isn't IO limited. Might be because it needs to fetch things over then network and they aren't cached for some reason, or some other program related issue.

 

I'm guessing, as a test, if you setup a webserver like nginx to serve those posters they would appear instantly which would prove it's something going on in emby's code.

[pclausen 41]

I went ahead and recorded my desktop using OBS.  I had top running as well.  Don't seem to be any bottlenecks anywhere from what I can tell.  Also, I have a 10 Gbps connection between my workstation and the Emby server, so I don't think it's a LAN issue either.

 

Embybrowsespeed

Edited November 18, 2015 by pclausen