There are a few requests our there for various settings with secondary systems assisting a primary system. Combining some of those thoughts with one I did not find. It would be nice to have secondary servers doing things like the DVR recording functionality, assist with transcoding, database, etc. We all would love to buy the latest 64 core Xeon processor with 32 gig of ram but we just can’t afford it. We need to work with affordable distributed 4-8 core systems with 4-8 gig of ram. Being able to offload the DVR recording feature (and the commercial removal) to additional systems, or the ability to offload the database to another machine would build a really nice plex eco system. There is now sub $100 transcoding devices out there running ubuntu and having the ability to add one or two of those would be a huge benefit.
I have an 8 core AMD cpu with 16 gig of ram and a SSD drive running OpenSuse (been on Ubuntu and windows in past and I get most stability in last 3 months with Suse). I store my movies on a synology NAS and the DVR stuff on a local 5TB disk. All of the nics are bonded (both plex and NAS) on a gigabit network. When I am recording 4 shows with the DVR from two homeruns it is just about everything the system can do and if I enable commercial removal for those shows I will occasionally get a bad file (audio and video becomes way out of sync). If I could off load the DVR recording portion to one or more 2-4 core machines that would be plenty of power to record and remove commercials and possibly encode them in mp4 format as that is my format of choice. If I could offload the database to another machine that is already a database server (postgres in this case) then that is less work for the primary system to deal with and gives something the secondaries to talk to. It seems once I got past 1000 movies and 4000 songs plex acted sluggish or had problems with just stop recording DVR or database corruption. It also does not help to also have about 10k pictures and using nearly every feature plex has to offer with multiple people. Auto upload of picture from phones, DVR, audio, most tv watching, sharing with friends. We embraced the product but are seeing some limitations with what appears to be combined feature limitations.
What is this request:
- Ability to have a primary system and one or more secondaries.
- During install it asks if this is a primary or secondary or the need for a separate secondary installer.
- Features that could be on secondary: DVR recording, database, transcoding, management of a particular library (music, photos, video, etc), anything else that could take memory or CPU and could be seen as a single feature.
- If the secondary is going to be a database system then during install it does the required to load to existing database or setup a new one and do what is required to handle both.
- The primary system would relay the needed request to the secondary and the secondary relays response back to master. A 100/1000 network should be fast enough to handle this traffic.
- The primary setup connection to slave and uses a secure key or cert for auth. Lets add some security here please.
- The configuration is nearly automated. When primary initiates to the secondary the primary says secondary is now DVR record server and sets up that feature on the secondary along with update database with required info etc.
- Most metadata and configuration is stored in the database so all nodes are able to see the same information. May even need to look at a distributed database type like postgres/MariaDB/etc instead of what I think is DB.
- The primary will still have all features installed on it so it is able to take over any feature a secondary is doing in the event of secondary system loss (hardware failure, network loss, power down, etc). The database would be the only exception to this if the database is offloaded to a secondary.
I see these features as being something that could help the heavy users of Plex get the most out of the product while still allowing everyone else to continue with what they have. As RAID helped make many small disks appear as one larger disk this would be DAPS… distributed, affordable, plex, service. Making many small systems appear as one larger powerful service.
