Hi ,
Apologies for any double posting but I have tried multiple ways of stopping my films buffering and nothing seems to work.
Am pulling my hair out with this problem so any help would be appreciated.
Lets start with my System, Mac Pro Quad Core 3.7GHz i5 with 16GB 1866 DDR3 Ram with 256GB SSD (Transcode directory mapped on here)
Have 5x Thunderbolt Duo Hard drives in Raid for Media.
Internet 300MB up/300MB down FTTH connection in Spain.
I have no Firewalls on in the Router or the Mac and all of the relevant ports are forwarded and tested working.
I am based in the UK so remotely connecting to my Plex server.
With this set up I should be able to easily stream a 4k file to my clients in the UK where I have FTTC 80MB/20MB internet however I am unable to stream any file at over 720P/4MBs in Plex without buffering.
I cannot direct stream to my Roku box, My iPad or my MAC in the UK at any resolution above that without problems.
I have tested the connection at both ends using speedtest.net results below.
UK with nearest UK server [URL=http://beta.speedtest.net/result/6543665601][IMG]
UK with nearest Spanish server [URL=http://beta.speedtest.net/result/6543652184][IMG]
Spain with nearest Spanish sever URL=http://beta.speedtest.net/result/6543688168][IMG]
and lastly Spain to my nearest UK server [URL=http://beta.speedtest.net/result/6543682925][IMG]
All these seem OK so moved onto iPerf3 to test the connection between MY Mac in Spain and the one in UK with these results using port 32400 over TCP to rule out my ISP throttling.
Connecting to host (removed ip), port 32400
[ 5] local 192.168.1.250 port 51195 connected to (removed ip) port 32400
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bitrate
[ 5] 0.00-1.00 sec 4.94 MBytes 41.4 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 1.00-2.00 sec 8.05 MBytes 67.5 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 2.00-3.00 sec 8.84 MBytes 74.2 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 3.00-4.00 sec 7.98 MBytes 66.9 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 4.00-5.00 sec 8.83 MBytes 74.1 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 5.00-6.00 sec 8.64 MBytes 72.5 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 6.00-7.00 sec 8.37 MBytes 70.2 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 7.00-8.00 sec 8.84 MBytes 74.2 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 8.00-9.00 sec 8.23 MBytes 69.0 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 9.00-10.00 sec 8.85 MBytes 74.2 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 10.00-11.00 sec 8.18 MBytes 68.7 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 11.00-12.00 sec 8.90 MBytes 74.7 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 12.00-13.00 sec 8.83 MBytes 74.1 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 13.00-14.00 sec 8.26 MBytes 69.3 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 14.00-15.00 sec 8.84 MBytes 74.2 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 15.00-16.00 sec 8.26 MBytes 69.3 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 16.00-17.00 sec 8.36 MBytes 70.1 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 17.00-18.00 sec 8.84 MBytes 74.2 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 18.00-19.00 sec 8.69 MBytes 72.9 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 19.00-20.00 sec 8.87 MBytes 74.4 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 20.00-21.00 sec 8.72 MBytes 73.2 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 21.00-22.00 sec 8.92 MBytes 74.8 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 22.00-23.00 sec 8.89 MBytes 74.5 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 23.00-24.00 sec 8.84 MBytes 74.1 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 24.00-25.00 sec 8.75 MBytes 73.4 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 25.00-26.00 sec 8.89 MBytes 74.6 Mbits/sec
These results seem to prove that there is no problem between those 2 points as they pretty much Max out the available download bandwidth that I have in the UK.
I have tried routing through NGINX and CloudFlare on port 443 and 80 with a lot of help from Forums and one specific person I have managed to get that all up and running but makes no difference whatsoever exactly the same results still buffers at anything over 8MBs.
Having googled for hours I tried using AirVPN with port forwarding which worked really well was able to get Remote access working no problem but the speeds were still awful. Within the VPN I ran speedtest which gave me results of over 100MB up/ 100MB down but the Data counter which runs while the VPN was on never went above 4MBs while trying to stream a film and again buffered.
I have Deleted all the Files , Cache etc and the Plex Application , Reinstalled it with only 4 media files sitting on the same SSD as Plex in MP4 and that has not cured the problem.
I tried removing and changing the Upload speed in Plex settings with various restarts and that makes no difference.
Am keeping an eye on the activity monitor within my MAC and see some serious jumps in CPU usage at the start of a stream but they settle down and the logs show that the transcoding value always stays around 5 even when multiple files going.
The Data sent/sec over Network at the bottom of activity monitor never seems to go above 5MBs while trying to stream a file over Plex but as soon as I run iPerf between Spain and UK Macs on port 32400 it jumps immediately to over 30MBs.
I am wondering whether to try running PLEX inside a docker but that’s not something I have any experience with so would need a dummies guide to installing and getting it working.
I know this is a long winded post but I needed to explain everything in the hope that somebody has an idea what the problem could be.
I guess if it were possible I would try replacing the machine and see if that is the problem but not easily done 1500 miles away.
