It just occurred to me, it would be pretty sweet if a benchmark was developed to measure server performance, and gave some kind of estimate for simultaneous transcodes/streams, and/or other useful data. That would be pretty handy. =)
There is one already. It’s called passmarks. And this scale can give you the information you already requested here.
Check out this support document: https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/201774043-What-kind-of-CPU-do-I-need-for-my-Server-
Passmark metrics are good to go by – but what if Plex had its own bench built-in? Useful for those systems where Passmark cannot be ran on.
I’m going to suggest something slightly different to your suggestion, but Buffering Troubleshooting - some kind of system/network benchmark was closed as duplicate.
In addition to benchmarking the server, it’d be great if there were an inbuilt tool to benchmark/diagnose the client+server end-to-end. This would help understand if the client, server, and network are adequate, identify optimal settings, and troubleshoot any issues.
Some things I’d like to see are
- Connection quality between client and server (eg. using iperf)
- Transcoding performance of the client (not aware of any good way to do this)
- Transcoding performance of the server (probably lots of ways to do this)
- Performance with different bitrates, codecs, subtitle formats
- Impact of various settings (subtitle burning, refresh rate switching, io cache)
With this tool, perhaps you could also set up a database of hardware config and benchmark scores to:
- Help people purchase appropriate hardware
- Benchmark consumer client devices (xbox, CCwGTV, Apple TV, Nvidia Shield, etc)
- Help people identify if their device is performing worse than other identical devices
Passmark is only so helpful. Their ratings are only given as a guide for guessing to how a CPU bound transcode will go for your system. What about GPU accelerated transcoding? I have no idea how powerful my GPU needs to be. I’d love to know what the minimum hardware requirements would be for my needs so that I don’t overspend. I’d also like to know what the best GPU or IGPU would be for power efficiency.
We need to see some kind of benchmark for PMS.
