Moving from Emby Windows to Linux, some advice needed

[ecrispy 38]

I've been running Emby on my Windows pc for years and am very happy with it. I will be building a media server it will still run Windows, but I want to move toward the following setup -

 

- Linux VM running under Hyper-V

- in this VM run Emby and other services as docker containers

- use a reverse proxy to make it easy to access the services

 

I want to do this to have a more reproducible setup with less manual installs etc, but does it have any disadvantages? 

 

Questions

 

- which Linux is recommended? Debian? Ubuntu Server?

- my storage will be shared from Windows to Linux via SMB/NFS. I read that NFS has better performance. 

- how can I use a ramdisk for the transcoding space? How much space is needed for this and does it have any benefits vs using disk?

 

If anyone else has done this please share any tips

[pir8radio 1312]

I can speak for the ramdisk part....    I wouldn't waste my time on using a ramdisk for trans-coding space, a ssd would be fine... I would use the ramdisk for the cache directory...     FFMPEG will encode the video as fast as it can and store that temporary video in the transcode folder, but ffmpeg has two bottlenecks CPU and how fast it can grab the original video file...  If it can only pull it slowly off a network drive, or local disk, there is no reason to store it on a super fast ramdisk.     Again save the fast ramdisk for cache, but you will want to use a ramdisk that saves to disk, so it doesn't have to rewrite those files after a reboot (persistent RamDisk). 

 

Those of you who have seen some of my posts, know I love the stats       So here are the results of six concurrent transcodes read/write's on my transcode SSD...  Not even stressing it...   Note that my crappy ssd's top read/write speed is 340,804,810 Bytes/sec  six streams peaked at 60,711,083 Bytes/sec.    That's with a SSD, my ramdisk max read/write speed is 2,807,214,035 Bytes/sec   see how much speed you would waste...    

 

Edited September 9, 2016 by pir8radio