(Feature Request) Load balance / cluster support

General Discussions
1

I know this is a long running discussion and request for PMS. I know it can be done with some serious work, but likely will break if 2 or more servers try to edit the shared PMS data on disk at the same time.

The front end side of the load balancing can of course be done very easy using software or hardware solutions. However the problem usually lies with the above mentioned issue of file access like logs, database, so on.

This isnt about why or why not you need/should use load balance with PMS, its about if Plex can add some form of support for it on the backend side of things. So please dont fill this with comments about why people shouldnt need load balance, or things of this nature.

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2

Okay so I think PLEX should have load balancing and, should be a very simple architecture. The idea of a PLEX Master and PLEX Slaves. The PLEX should act as a Master in a Cluster and the PLEX slaves should be Workers.

Installing the Slaves with a very simple Linux image with all the drivers needed for their hardware, then using PLEX’s already inbuild network discovery system. Should be able to

  1. Open a channel to the Original stored file,
  2. Transcode that file with the most efficient process possible,
  3. Stream that content back through the PLEX Master to the requested client.

Features:
The Master should have a table of features and abilities stored about the Slave OS, CPU and GPU capabilities.
If a 4K request comes in and Slave A is unable to handle 4K transcoding, then send to Slave B.
If Slave B is already at capacity then move a 1080p job back to Slave A.

PLEX Remote Transcoding (https://github.com/wnielson/Plex-Remote-Transcoder) has already displayed an ability to perform distributed Plex Transcoding using basic SSH commands and NFS as distributed file access. The slaves have RO access to the Masters transcoding library, this has a limitation that all the slaves have to have the same architecture and approximately the same Linux kernel.

Integrating this into the main Plex image, I feel would be a major help to people using PLEX.

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