Calculate the user capacity of an emby server - How many will my server support?

[JuJuJurassic 49]

I'm trying to work out if I'm near my limit of users on my emby server. It's very difficult as there are so many variables. Any advice would be appreciated.  

The storage server is a Trunas server connected with 2x 10gb links to the Emby server. It's never heavily loaded, and is probably overkill. But that's just shipping the files. It runs on a Dell T340 with 64 GB Ram 

The emby server runs ubuntu 20.04.6 LTS, it's CPU is a ": 11th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-11900K @ 3.50GHz" and has 64GB of Ram.

It has a 

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GP107 [GeForce GTX 1050 Ti] (rev a1)
        Subsystem: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd GP107 [GeForce GTX 1050 Ti]
        Kernel driver in use: nvidia

It has the following drives in it, and uses the nvme's for os and transcoding.

WDS100T1X0E-00AFY0        614600WD  2139DV441511         nvme0n1
CT2000P3PSSD8             P9CR40D   2452E99D0DAF         nvme1n1
SanDisk Ultra II          00RL      154518448616         sda
SanDisk Ultra II          00RL      154568441773         sdb
CT2000MX500SSD1           045       2307E6AED821         sdc
TOSHIBA HDWG440           0601      32G0A07CFZ0G         sdd
SanDisk Ultra II          00RL      154518446923         sde
SanDisk Ultra II          00RL      154568442571         sdf

So how do I know how many users it can support simultaneously? It seems to handle 4/5, which is the maximum I've ever had, for family access. But I'm looking at allowing some friends' kids access over Christmas and want to check if can do it without any issues.

 

What do you think?

Thanks

[Lessaj 467]

That's a tricky question to answer because it depends. If everyone is direct playing the files then you're only limited by bandwidth - which with 2x 10gb links you're not going to max out even with 20 users streaming 4k remuxes at the same time (say 75 Mbps each, that's only 1.5 Gbps out of your maximum possible 20 Gbps), you'd be limited by your internet connection if dealing with remote users but otherwise locally you'll never cap that. If you have a lot of transcoding occurring then your 1050 Ti is going to be the bottleneck - you can also utilize QuickSync with that CPU but I'm not sure how it handles multiple GPUs in that case. If you have throttling enabled that can help minimize the transcoding impact, but that again also depends on the transcoding load - transcoding large 4k files is much harder to do in real time compared to 1080p or lower resolution content, having throttling enabled just gives it more cycles to process multiple streams since it's not going full tilt all the time and does it in sprints.

[tedfroop21 86]

32 minutes ago, Lessaj said:

because it depends.

When I worked as technical support and I said that my boss would say to abandon all hope of a useful answer.....

 

Your internet connection may be your only bottleneck.  Internet data overhead is hard to calculate. There are numerous monitoring tools for ubuntu though.  I would find and try one out to see what data transfer rates are like for your current users.

 

[Luke 42077]

Right number of users isn't so much important as is the amount of concurrent activity.

[JuJuJurassic 49]

I know it's difficult, I have a  2gb up / down link. Not many 4k films. 

Your right it's not users, it's concurrent users. Can anyone recommend a suitable tool to look at the load on the Emby server

Side question: there was a patch to unleash the full power of the 1050Ti. After updating Emby, does that overwrite the hack/patch?

Thanks

[Q-Droid 989]

Your Intel iGPU is way better than the 1050Ti, you shouldn't even be using the nvidia for transcoding.

 

 

[RanmaCanada 494]

54 minutes ago, JuJuJurassic said:

I know it's difficult, I have a  2gb up / down link. Not many 4k films. 

Your right it's not users, it's concurrent users. Can anyone recommend a suitable tool to look at the load on the Emby server

Side question: there was a patch to unleash the full power of the 1050Ti. After updating Emby, does that overwrite the hack/patch?

Thanks

BytemyBits on youtube solved this long ago. Your limitation is your hard drive speed and your uplink. As you claim to have 2gb up, that is your limit to deal with as that is slower than your hard drive array, as it's 250MB/s. Since you don't have many 4k files, transcoding 4k is not a real problem. I would personally replace that 1050Ti as it's a potato and the ram severely limits how many transcodes it can handle in real world scenarios. As Q-Droid says, your iGPU is far superior to it anyways, and you should be using that for transcoding. So basically users x video bandwidth.

When bandwidth is not a problem, a 13900k can do 18 4k transcodes before it starts to barf. Tested with an NVME array. Your 11900k, which uses the same asics, Quicksync V8, should be able to handle a similar load.

[Lessaj 467]

1 hour ago, JuJuJurassic said:

Side question: there was a patch to unleash the full power of the 1050Ti. After updating Emby, does that overwrite the hack/patch?

You're referring to the patch that unlocks the number of concurrent transcode streams? No, updating Emby has no relation to that, that patches files related to the Nvidia driver. Also the current number of streams is actually quite high, it used to be very limited to like 2 or 3 but I think it's currently 8 out of the box. I still use the patch anyway even though most playback is direct.