**Background: **
I want Plex Server to put the temporary transcode files in my RAM instead of wearing down my SSD or HDDs. This is possible to do by using RAM Disk software or by mapping the temp transcode directory to /tmp.
This worked pretty bad before, but with server update 1.9.7.4441 (November 2017) the server would start purging old chunks of streams when we started to run out of disk space (RAM). This seems to happen when there is around 100 MB left of free space (RAM).
This makes it possible to only have something low like 4 GB of RAM in your Plex Server, even though you’re transcoding/Direct Streaming a >4 GB file.
Example: If you wanted to direct stream/transcode a 10 GB file to RAM before, you would need >10 GB of RAM. Now you don’t as Plex will automatically purge old chunks once you get to ~100 MB of free disk space on the transcode disk (RAM).
This made a huge improvement and makes it possible to have a single stream in RAM or on very low disk space HDDs/SSDs.
However there is one big flaw…
The problem:
if you try to start another stream when you are down to very little free disk space (RAM) you will get the “not enough disk space” error and can’t watch.
My suggestion/request:
Do any of these to fix this problem:
a) purge old chunks more aggressively (like when we’re down to 500 MB or maybe even 1 GB of free disk space) - or add an (advanced) option to let us choose at what threshold
b) when a new stream is started, purge old chunks of any other streams (this is probably not a good solution)
c) add official support for transcoding to RAM, and make Plex start looking at RAM usage to choose when to purge old chunks and allocate the resources more evenly between streams
Why do I want to transcode to RAM?
- Because I don’t want to wear out my SSD unnecessarily by writing transcodes to it constantly (I’ve already got 10 TB writes on it after only a few months)
- It’s from a computer perspective more nice, as RAM is made to store temporary things
- It’s faster
