Server Version#: 4.48.1
Player Version#: 6.7 build 4
Hey guys, this problem may be expected but I wanted to get your input.
I live in a rural area with internet speeds that most of you would laugh at.
15mbps down/1.2mbps up.
Plex works great in my house for my wife and myself.
My nephew lives about 70 miles away and I added him as a user to my Plex server. I told him I wasn’t sure it would work with my slow internet upload speed.
He was able to use it and it seemed to work well for him. But when I tried watching from Plex here at home at the same time I experienced frequent buffering.
Since I’m streaming internally, I shouldn’t be affected by my slow upload speed and it looks like the issue was that my CPU was maxed out.
I built my PC several years ago - it’s a quad-core i5 3.2ghz. 16GB of RAM.
All 4 cores were pegged at 100% when this was happening.
My video card is also very old by today’s standards.
It’s an Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS.
I’m assuming the slow upload speed is likely causing more transcoding to stream to my nephew, in turn maxing out my CPU.
Are there any tweaks I can try to lessen the load on the CPU?
If not, a couple other thoughts I had -
Would a more modern video card help?
I have a spare PC. Could I set up this other PC with Plex and my same account and dedicate it to stream remotely?
Would a NAS box (Synology, etc) with Plex handle streaming 2 users better?
Thanks for the input.
Any thoughts on the other options of upgrading my video card or moving to a Plex-supported NAS?
I imagine the NAS boxes wouldn’t have the processing power I already have though.
Is your server having to transcode when streaming locally? Sounds like it is. Direct streaming uses negligible CPU resources, but transcoding, particularly on an older quad core CPU can very easily max it out.
Personally, I don’t think creating a second, low-quality library for your nephew makes sense, I’d lean towards having enough CPU power for two simultaneous transcodes over duplicating the entire library in low-res.
Some standalone NAS boxes have decent horsepower but I’m not up on which ones are best. And, frankly, its probably going to be cheaper to build a dedicated plex server box (or upgrade your current machine) rather than getting a QNap or something…
Good question - I’ve been using Plex for several years but never had the need to learn much about transcoding so I probably need to do more research.
My main Roku in the living room is wired to a gigabit router and I believe it’s primarily direct streamed. I just checked the dashboard from when this occurred yesterday - image shown below.
It looks like with him connected it was reducing my overall bandwidth. I disabled his account and it gave me back my bandwidth.
I was just searching for video card options and ran across this thread and searched for a comparison of my current 8800-GTS to a GTX 1600 someone recommended in that thread and found this. The GTX-1660 has a +1,711% increase in real-world speed over mine. Wow. Might be time for a new video card at a minimum.
Assuming you’re running a windows box, yes? I’m not familiar with Plex server on platforms outside of Linux, but I’m not certain a GPU upgrade is going to do you any good, unless Plex has GPU transcoding implemented on the Windows side.
What CPU are you running? You might be able to upgrade it to a more powerful CPU while keeping the rest of the system as is.
Yes, running Windows 10. It’s an i5 650 3.2gz. 2 cores, 4 logical processors.
I have a Gigabyte GA-P55A-UD3 rev 2.0 motherboard so it’s an LGA 1156 socket.
Looks like I can snag an i7 for only about $30 from eBay. Not sure if that would do much - if I would just have 4 cores maxed out instead of only 2 maxed out.
Edit - I do have an empty shell of a system sitting around that might be time to build back up. It has an i7-2600 processor. I think I have some RAM around here to throw in.
Definitely worth trying for free - and if it works well I could offload my Plex server to it since my i5 is my main desktop and Plex server as well.
That i7-2600 system would be a decent idea. The cheapest option is to toss an i7-760 into your currents system (assuming your CPU cooler is up to the task) and that will close double your compute power for transcoding.
The i7-2600 would be far more powerful since it supports QuickSync and AVX and will transcode much more efficiently in Software and if you can leverage QuickSync it will have no issues transcoding multiple simultaneous streams. However its a second system and the cost will be more if you need RAM or something.
Either way you’ve got some good options here to possibly solve the problem with very little cost.
That’s a cool little NUC. Apple-like in many ways. Lots of tech smashed in a tiny case. Lots of $$$'s smashed in the price tag.
The i7-2600 isn’t a great choice - at least, it’s not something you should invest more money in to support transcoding. That’s a Sandy Bridge CPU, had the first generation of Quick Sync, video quality was quite poor, and it can’t decode HEVC at all.
I was just watching that video last night.
It’s a bit hard to believe sponsored content but I’m sure it’s fine.
On the other hand, NUC pricing is one thing that’s always turned me off.
I agree a 2600 is still not ideal at all, but it’s a relatively free option for the poster so I figured why not.
Ideally some more modern processor with more capable quick sync with support for HEVC would be ideal. That being said I run a pretty old dual socket e5-2637v3 setup on a FreeNAS system (so no hardware encode support) and with 8c/16t available I can run probably 4-5 simultaneous transcodes which is plenty. 4 cores on a somewhat comparable generation should be able to handle 2 with a tiny bit of room to spare. With quick sync that changes obviously.
And a NUC isn’t ideal, IMO due to the severe storage constraints the packaging presents. And you’re paying quite the premium for the form factor which might not be worth it for the OP.
