CPU related buffering - Tmanok

[Tmanok 0]

Hi everyone, 

 

I began this multi-month adventure with Emby on FreeNAS on an 8 thread mediocre Xeon which was unable to playback at more than 720p 4Mbps- sad because FreeNAS was playing nice with the dual gigabit network card and 8Gbps fibre card for once. Then I tried Emby on an Ubuntu server using consumer grade equipment (i5 3rd gen) and it was having a hard time playing back at 1080p 10Mbps (not terrible). But the file server and media server are on a 1Gbps switch with 150Mbps dedicated WAN connection to the internet and my home download is 300Mbps so I wanted native quality (2160p). 

 

Now it's running on 14 threads of 2x12 thread xeons (X5675s) with 8GB of DDR3 ECC and I'm still getting CPU buffering issues even on the 1Gbps LAN. I can play 1080p 60Mbps, however much higher and the video stops for about 20 seconds or more and then starts back up. The highly interesting thing for me is that I'm operating on Turnkey Linux's Emby LXC on Proxmox- I'm able to watch all of the specs using the web-GUI dashboard, top and Htop. Even while it's buffering on the client browser, the Emby server is using approximately 45-75% CPU utilization, not 100%. Additionally it's never gone above 3GB of RAM usage even with multiple clients streaming. 

 

Has Turnkey Linux done something to restrict FFMpeg's CPU utilization? I've never seen this sort of activity and I'd really like it if the transcoding would either work better or use the CPU I'm providing, it's surprising that the resources allocated aren't being utilized to perform better. 

Thanks everyone, somewhat longtime reader as I can only find time to do this stuff here n there, but never taken the time to post anything.

 

Tmanok

 

PS yes that is episode 1 of season 1, planet earth II. Yes that's the same episode that Ozzyman Reviews commented on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfBNG5KD1oU Just in case you were wondering

[Luke 37028]

Hi there, we have a throttle feature that will reduce CPU usage of transcoding in some situations. You can turn this off in server transcoding settings if you prefer.

[Tmanok 0]

Good morning Luke!

 

I have in good fact already adjusted my transcoder settings, here's what they were as of last night when I sent those other two screen shots.

Thanks for your help!

 

Tmanok

 

[Luke 37028]

What version of Emby Server?

[Tmanok 0]

Way out of date! Just the way I like it, I'll update it right now haha....

[Tmanok 0]

Installed....

Reconfigured to "uncheck throttling" which in fact is actually in my transcoder settings menu now.

Testing....

 

Performance = Increase, last night I could stream to my phone the rest of that episode of planet earth at 1080p 30Mbps. Right now, 1080p 60Mbps is playing very smoothly. 4K @ 80Mbps running smoothly as well. 

 

CPU Usage = Increased, Screenshot 1 is CPU usage @ 1080p 60Mbps, Screenshot 2 is CPU usage @ 4KUHD 80Mbps.

 

 

 

Settings within Emby appear to be different than before, I'm a bit disappointed by the warning about needing Emby Premiere to use hardware acceleration, I was considering the idea of purchasing an old $40 Geforce GT 710 (cheapest you can get) for PCIe 2.0 x16 Channel, it has a max resolution of 2160p and supports NVENC, however the setting for hardware acceleration has changed, now there's "Yes" "No" and "Advanced" which tells me jack squat because I don't have Emby Premiere? Thanks for any info on this. 

 

And thank you for your help! I suppose the older version I was using lacked the ability to disable CPU / Encoder throttling. 

Have a nice day Luke,

 

Tmanok

[Luke 37028]

Thanks for the feedback. If you temporarily change the hardware acceleration dropdown to advanced, it will tell you what GPU was detected by Emby, if any.

 

I'm not sure that it will be detected for you as I think we have more work to do when running under freebsd/freenas. Thanks.

[Tmanok 0]

Hi Luke,

 

I'm running it currently as a Turnkey Linux LXC container within Proxmox. In the first post I was simply stating that I had tried on my FreeNAS machine (HP Proliant DL320 G6) with 16TB HDD and 24GB DDR3 ECC, but the CPU was pitiful at transcoding and even a high end upgrade wouldn't do what I need without a GPU. 

The Turnkey Linux Emby Server: https://www.turnkeylinux.org/mediaserver

I'm using 14 out of 24 cores from my DL360 G7, 2x Intel Xeon x5675, 48GB DDR3 ECC and a measly 2x 120GB SSDs with a couple of 300GB HDDs for primary storage. Considering switching to Xen Project with Xen Orchestra because of added features including better networking features (private VM/CT LANs), better performance and lastly better control of storage subsystems. Proxmox is considerably easier to install than most appliances, that's why I really enjoy using it but there are some sacrifices made for the convenience. 

 

Thanks again Luke, I did check out the advanced tab under hardware acceleration, a couple of titles appeared but as you said nothing listed (The CPU doesn't have internal graphics and of course I don't have a GPU or anything related). I've compiled a spreadsheet of NVENC and NVDEC Cards but then I found an even more comprehensive list here:

https://developer.nvidia.com/video-encode-decode-gpu-support-matrix

 

Tmanok

[Luke 37028]

Thanks for the info. We should be able to work this out on Freebsd.