Transcoding in ramdisk

[Bonfi 2]

Hi all,

 

so I was wondering: has anyone ever tried to transcode on ramdisk instead of on the disk?

If yes, is it better?

If no, do you think it could be worth a try?

 

Thanks.

Bonfi

[fc7 123]

I may be wrong but it would be very very weird that your transcoding bottleneck will be your harddisk. Most of times if not all it will be the CPU. You may only see an improvement if your network throughput is very very high (faster than your disk throughput), you have many many concurrent clients and assuming that your CPU(s) transcoding throughput is again, higher than your disks.

If your goal is faster transcoding or more concurrent clients transcoding just add more CPU muscle (or helpers like quicksync).

 

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Edited December 30, 2015 by fc7

[Bonfi 2]

I'm aware that the bottleneck is almost always the CPU, as it is in my case, but it could be useful in order to reduce I/O on the disk.

Am I wrong?

 

However, this is just an "academic" question 

[fc7 123]

Not wrong actually it will but the i/o on disk because of transcoding is insignificant, unless you have many many concurrent users or you are using the same spindles for other i/o intensive tasks that can compite with transcoding.

 

 

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[Bonfi 2]

In this case, I totally agree with you that it should be useless.

Anyway, I think I'll try and if everything works fine I'll let you know

 

Thanks and happy new year

[runtimesandbox 171]

This should be easily doable.

 

The only reason I can see for doing this would be if you are transcoding on an SSD and wanted to reduce wear / increase life span

[Luke 42077]

zero benefit even with a lot of users as transcoding is dominated by the cpu

[tymanthius 18]

I do this b/c I have a lot of mem and it seems to help a little. But mainly b/c my vm has only a little disk space, and I have a tmpfs just for transcoding.  

 

That, and I don't have to worry about 'orphaned transcode files' which something that plex did sometimes. A quick restart will clear those if it crops up.  But I dont' think it will.

[spootdev 56]

zero benefit even with a lot of users as transcoding is dominated by the cpu

Not everyone has the spindles too keep many streams happy at once.

[Bonfi 2]

zero benefit even with a lot of users as transcoding is dominated by the cpu

 

I'm aware of that, I'll to do this just for personal interest 

[fc7 123]

Not everyone has the spindles too keep many streams happy at once.

 

Now this is interesting. Are you actually seeing a bottleneck in the harddisk while transcoding and not in the CPU? How many streams at once? How did you arrive to that conclusion?

[spootdev 56]

You mean things like simple iotop or zpool iostat commands?