Plex Load Balancing Server Hardware

Plex Media Server Desktops & Laptops
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Looking for some advice.

I know officially at this time load balancing between servers is not supported. I’ve seen various applications/load balancing firewalls/routers/software to incorporate this which I’ve seen poor results on or no longer supported.

Does anyone know of a currently developed method to load balance plex servers based on their current hardware load?

At present I have a setup where I got two different servers setup identically with the same local shares for transcode for friends (local on our network) where if one server is overly utilized I manually try my other server as do others when we experience buffering or over utilization. Realistically I would love a setup where it could automatically switch between the two based on usage.

I know I can setup this based on bandwidth load balancing, but this is not consistent for plex based on bandwidth each file requires, transcoding needs (hardware capabilities) etc.

Has anyone came across a method of doing this based on CPU/GPU usage that is still under development? I’m not 100% sure this is even achievable tbh without official support from Plex with back end communication.

For us die hard plex members I do find it kind of strange that there is not a method officially (based on my poor google skills) that can achieve this.

Has anyone found a means of this to monitor and LB based on hardware usage?

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Plex is designed and coded to run on a unified, SMP, host. Running in an asymmetric (ASMP) environment on multiple hosts as one ‘server’ instance is not supported. Each OS instance will have its own server ID. Plex.tv only allows one host per server. ID

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If transcoding is your biggest bottleneck, you have basically 2 options;

  1. convert your media to the most common denominator (ie mp4/stereo) so that the media direct streams in most cases.

  2. build a newer server that supports hardware transcoding

There were projects in the past which attempted to provide ‘distributed’ transcoding, but I don’t know if any are still active or viable. None of which were ever directly supported by plex.

Aside from cost, #2 is the best answer if you are having server bottlenecks.

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