Upgrade Suggestions

[TolkienBard 58]

Now that I have "finished" adding media to the server (save new releases of course) I have now started to play more with the bells and whistles. What I have discovered though is that my machine is not beefy enough to handle the load with all the spiffy plugins active. Enabling Cover Art brings the server to a crawl. Even if I just leave it be to load images for an hour or so, the performance hit is still extreme, bordering on crippling. That leaves me wondering what I can or should do to increase performance so that I can take advantage of all the available bells and whistles. 

 

Current Server:

 

Processor: 2x  Xeon L5520 @ 2.27 GHz

RAM: 24 GB

OS; Windows 8.1 (64-bit)

 

 

I have a sizable library of roughly 3,000 movies plus another 1,200 TV series. It isn't a massive collection, but it is certainly nothing to sneeze at. Right now it is taking up about 45 TB of HDD space. I have the metadata being saved to the individual title folders.

 

Any thoughts? Currently I am kicking around 2 possibilities, but I'm not sure if either one gives a significant boost or not. THe first is to increase to a 4-processor server, using the same Xeon L5220s. This would double the processor power I have now. THe other option I am looking at is one of the new Skylake i7 processors and possibly even adding a dedicated video card to do GPU transcoding.

 

 

I'm open to suggestions.

[Nologic 30]

After all the cover art is generated, things should get much better.

 

If things still seem bogged down...then I'd see about upgrading...but that depends on how things are performing.

 

If its a matter of browsing through artwork and such...then get yourself an SSD and move Emby onto that...or clone the whole drive to the SSD...depending on the size of the SSD & the current space taken up by the current drive.

 

If it's a matter of how many people can view transcoded...then it's time to do something about the CPU. However ideally you have things setup to Direct Play...so that transcoding is rarely done.

 

If you have a four socket board just laying around..then try out the extra two Xeon's...other wise I'd nudge you in the direction of getting the new i7.

 

This mostly comes down to me not knowing how well Emby is threaded...I'm guessing most actions will be single threaded...in which case the new i7 will be nearly twice as fast. However transcoding...4 Xeon's "should" do better...but there have been a number of instructions added to newer CPU's that aid in encoding & decoding. Plus the i7 has a GPU built into it, that supports GPU transcoding currently offered by Emby. So to that end...the i7 might be better than the 4 Xeons...but I can't say for sure.

 

Here are some benchmarks I found.

UserBenchmark

CPUBoss

CPU World

 

Those don't really help...but give a very loose idea.

 

I have a i7 2700k and it does fine, with the exception that it really needs an SSD for the OS & Emby.

 

I'd let things go for a week & see if things improve.

 

If they don't, see if you can find a sweet deal on Sandy or Ivybridge based Xeons...failing that then get a new i7 Skylake.

 

While you can overclock Sandy & Ivy (K) to more or less match the performance of Skylake, the newer motherboards come with something called M.2 that allow you to used such speed daemons like this.

Edited December 14, 2015 by Nologic

[Deathsquirrel 745]

GPU transcoding is experimental at this time.  I can't recommend upgrading to get it.  A SSD for the OS and Emby drive will likely be your best upgrades if you just want faster image browsing in the UI.  Upgrade the CPU if you are committed to your current file formats and they are causing transcoding that your system can't keep up with.

 

Personally I suggest making sure you use widely compatible media formats and getting the SSD for the boot drive before anything else.

[TolkienBard 58]

If I go with a SSD for my OS, FlexRAID, and the server, and then point my metadata path to the SSD, what sort of space should I look at making sure I have available? I understand that depends on the size of my media library. I'm just concerned that a 250 GB drive might not be sufficient. Currently, I have metadata being saved to the individual folders. Under this scheme, my OS drive is using a touch over 100 GB. I don't really know how much space all these images are going to take up, but if all I have left is about 135 GB, I want to make sure it will all fit. I suppose I could play things safe and go with a 500 GB SSD, but those tend to be steeply priced and it seems like overkill in the extreme.

[ebr 16169]

If I go with a SSD for my OS, FlexRAID, and the server, and then point my metadata path to the SSD, what sort of space should I look at making sure I have available? I understand that depends on the size of my media library. I'm just concerned that a 250 GB drive might not be sufficient. Currently, I have metadata being saved to the individual folders. Under this scheme, my OS drive is using a touch over 100 GB. I don't really know how much space all these images are going to take up, but if all I have left is about 135 GB, I want to make sure it will all fit. I suppose I could play things safe and go with a 500 GB SSD, but those tend to be steeply priced and it seems like overkill in the extreme.

 

I wouldn't do this. I would keep saving the metadata to the media folders.  There would be no real advantage to saving it to the system drive.

[Koleckai Silvestri 1154]

What is the server's connection to the network?

 

If you're still using a single 1 Gigabit Ethernet connection, you may consider Link Aggregation to double, triple or quadruple that. Could even look into 10 or 40 Gigabit connections but those start getting expensive. It would allow your current system to put more information on the network and clients would seem faster. If your clients are wireless consider adding another access point to help lower congestion as well.

Edited December 15, 2015 by Koleckai Silvestri

[Deathsquirrel 745]

I wouldn't do this. I would keep saving the metadata to the media folders.  There would be no real advantage to saving it to the system drive.

 

Issues get posted all the time that would never have happened if people stored their metadata with their movies.  Please listen to EBR on this one.

 

Embynis on the SSD and so is its cache by default.  That's what you want for speed.

[TolkienBard 58]

Issues get posted all the time that would never have happened if people stored their metadata with their movies.  Please listen to EBR on this one.

 

Embynis on the SSD and so is its cache by default.  That's what you want for speed.

 

Leave the metadata where it is, but just move the Server program over to the SSD then? I would actually prefer to leave my metadata in the individual folders. For one thing, it just makes more sense to me. For another thing, should (knock on wood) something ever happen to one or more of my drives, the data is much more easily restored if all the metadata exists in the folders. I don't want to have to go through and re-identify all of my titles, including going through and finding the odd-ball ones that were mis-picked.

 

I just want my server to not come to a grinding hault when I enable the Cover Art plugin. Right now, enabling it is just crippling the system. The system is relatively quick and responsive when that plugin is not enabled. Sure, sometimes it complains a touch when I try to stream more than 3 streams at a time, but it still manages. However, it has trouble running one stream if Cover Art is running to populate new images.

[wraslor 70]

What is slowing to a crawl the server or the clients?  I'm running a slower server (granted more cores 2 old 6 core opterons) but still slower and mine runs just fine on clients and server.  

 

I have meta stored with files, SSD boot drive and 32gb ram with 30tb hdd on my server.

 

Clients range from android tv, iphones, htcps with ssd from atom up to i5 and all run just fine with coverart and other things enabled.  I think you have more than a cpu problem so we need to narrow down what is slow and what else is going on.

 

I should also add the server came with a single 4 core originally I only upgraded to the 2x 6 cores because I had them laying around but it ran fine with a quad too.

Edited December 15, 2015 by wraslor

[TolkienBard 58]

  I think you have more than a cpu problem so we need to narrow down what is slow and what else is going on.

 

 

 

I would be happy to take the time to troubleshoot whatever is causing the performance hit on my server. I do not yet have a SSD drive installed, nor will I have one until mid-January. (I have those pesky bill things to pay first.) So far as I can tell, it is simply having Cover Art running, but it is entirely possible (perhaps even likely) that I am wrong.

Edited December 16, 2015 by TolkienBard

[wraslor 70]

Are you running flexraid-f or -t?

[TolkienBard 58]

I am running FlexRAID -f.

 

Sent from my SM-G928V using Tapatalk

[cow666 6]

LOL.. I love the fact you think your specification is below par..

I'm running the Emby server on a converted desktop

C2D E7300 processor
4GB PC800 RAM

6X2TB HDD
Dual 1Gb NICS (Teamed)
Windows Server 2012 Essentials

8TB of assorted TV Shows and Movies

The only real slow downs I've experienced was with the initial data index when I was etting up which tbh I was expecting and I had issues using remote desktop connection before fitting the new dual NIC.

[CBers 7450]

Processor: 2x Xeon L5520 @ 2.27 GHz

RAM: 24 GB

OS; Windows 8.1 (64-bit)

 

I'm only running an old Dell XPS420, which is a 3Ghz Quad-Core processor with 8Gb RAM.

 

Nothing special, but it only needs to direct stream my media to various Emby clients.

 

[TolkienBard 58]

It sounds like I have more troubleshooting to do in order to figure out what is causing the system to come to a grinding halt when I have Cover Art active.

[FrostByte 5392]

If you figure it out, let us know.  I have had a similar issue here several times I've tried CoverArt and then almost immediately removed it because navigating within the webclient got so slow.  My movie/TV collection is smaller than yours also.

[Koleckai Silvestri 1154]

The problem is that the Cover Art addon manipulates the images on the fly. It would be nicer if it just altered the images once and stored them with the metadata while putting the originals in a backup directory. I had to uninstall it because it simply slowed everything down. No one in the family made any comments about it being gone. I guess they didn't pay much attention to the cover art changes. They did mention that the Roku was faster though.

Edited December 17, 2015 by Koleckai Silvestri

[TolkienBard 58]

The problem is that the Cover Art addon manipulates the images on the fly. It would be nicer if it just altered the images once and stored them with the metadata while putting the originals in a backup directory. I had to uninstall it because it simply slowed everything down. No one in the family made any comments about it being gone. I guess they didn't pay much attention to the cover art changes. They did mention that the Roku was faster though.

 

spite this, it seems that plenty of users with less beefy systems are able to make get Cover Art to run without it completely bogging down their system. I'm trying to figure out how to join that sub-sect of users. I happen to like the spiffied-up covers. At the very least, since I have 20 years worth of DVDs on the server, I like having the ribbon across the top that denotes HD or SD.

 

I had been assuming all this time that it was either my processor or my RAM. However, my RAM never reaches anything close to full utilization, so I ruled that out. Given that the problem increases drastically when the server is serving up a stream, I assumed the issue was with my processing power. Now it seems I may need to switch to a SSD for my OS. That's fine, I was going to make that move anyway, regardless of what other upgrades I wind up making.

 

I'm just trying to figure out how to not have the system almost die under the weight of the plugin when it is active. If I need an upgrade, so be it. It is starting to sound to me though, as if my system should already be plenty capable of handling the load. That means I need to figure out where the issue really is coming from.

[CBers 7450]

@@TolkienBard - if you think it is Cover Art, then perhaps raise another thread, with server logs, and let @@ebr look over them.

[Koleckai Silvestri 1154]

The current Emby server for Windows is 32 bit. That means it will use up to 4 Gigabytes of RAM. Nothing more. Each FFMPEG process is its own memory sandbox.

 

Streaming to the XBOX uses DLNA which may be a bit more processor intensive. If you're using Wi-Fi to connect, playbacks could saturate the link. I had to install a separate access point for upstairs due to this. However my most heavily used clients are Rokus and wired though CAT5e (upstairs) and CAT6 (downstairs). On these, I have boosted the bitrate they display at to the highest value. This allows most content to direct play.

 

For my server OS, I currently have a SATA 6G SSD. It has the OS and Emby running on it. The cache is on the SSD but metadata and transcode cache are stored on a 2.5" Toshiba magnetic drive. All my data is on 6 WD Red Drives, not currently using drive pooling or Raid. The processor is an i5-6500. It has 8 Gigabytes of RAM.

 

SSD will probably be the best bang for your buck. Leaving the cache and app on the SSD will speed things up. When the server goes 64-bit, it can better utilise your RAM. The other thing would be processors that support Quicksync. These are extra processing instructions specifically written for chewing through video processing. Most Intel Core series processors support this with the proper drivers installed.

 

Finally where I am at is network congestion. Can't really afford switching my entire network to 10 Gigabits right now but will be running at least two additional 1Gigabit connections to the server so each client gets potentially more bandwidth. Different clients can use different connections with the proper switches.

[ebr 16169]

The problem is that the Cover Art addon manipulates the images on the fly. 

 

That's not true.  Images are only generated when something changes that would cause the image to change.

 

There is already a thread here.  If you can provide any more details to your particular situation, that would be great.

[TolkienBard 58]

That's not true.  Images are only generated when something changes that would cause the image to change.

 

There is already a thread here.  If you can provide any more details to your particular situation, that would be great.

 

I am spending essentially the next 2 days at the theatre for Star Wars related reasons. I will reactivate CA this weekend and then post my server logs there so you can see what is happening. I'm fairly certain that CA is the culprit, as I experience no hiccups when it is not active.