I’m wanting a little bit of advice before I make my decision & hopefully peeps more experienced with Plex Servers than me could advise.
I currently run a dedicated home Plex server on a Windows 11 machine using a 1060 3GB GPU & a i7 4790K CPU & 16GB ram. Now I’ve not really had any issue’s with things, but I’ve noticed the larger my library gets, the less responsive the server menu is when I try using it on my TV or from a Roku Stick. Sluggish on menu selections or when starting to play movies, the loading/buffering at the start seems to get longer & longer.
Now, I have an x99 board with a E5 2690v4 I was planning on upgrading the server with. The large number of cores that gives it a vastly superior multi core performance. I’m just wanting to know if the upgrade would be an improvement. Google said this would be basically over kill, but I don’t mind as I already have the hardware. I just would like to be sure before I go do it.
The outcome will be extremely inconclusive.
While the Xeon has more cores, each of these cores is slower than one core of the i7.
And unfortunately, this single-thread performance is still very important for transcoding in Plex.
After the switch to the Xeon, the server might feel snappier when browsing the library, but the performance during transcoding might get worse.
I’m curious about how the slugishness compares to using the plex app on a pc. I’ve found upgrading to a new roku made a huge difference in responsiveness for me. And I believe the hardware in smart tvs isn’t the fastest either.
The CPU is only really used for transcoding (including normal transcoding, intro + credits detection, plus chapters, etc). The memory used by plex server is very small. I could run just fine with 4G ram under linux. Are you using direct-play on your stuff? Are you using 4k?
For perspective, my server is a virtualbox linux with 8G ram, 6 cpu cores ( i5-10400 CPU @ 2.90GHz), 12tb disk hosting 450 TV shows and 2600 movies.
Hmm, think I will leave it as is then if the Xeon won’t give any realistic improvements. I mean, as for the sluggish menu at times, I’ve had no problems, even when my 3 son’s are all streaming from my server at the same time I’m watching something. The GTX 1060 3GB handles up to 5 very well. So ty for saving me the trouble of swapping it over to realise its not made a difference
Well the server has 2 8TB HDDs & the OS runs off 1 NVMe 256GB & I’ve set the transcoding to run off another NVMe 256GB stick. 1 HDD is 80% full of movies, the other about 70% full of TV shows & the system has 16GB ram on win 11, bloatware all removed.
Works flawlessly when I watch from my desktop, it’s just the LG 4k TV that’s about 5-6 yrs old now & the Roku stick that’s just as long. I do have direct steaming enabled & also have it use my GPU for transcoding which it can do 5 simultaneous at once but rarely are 5 people watching at the same time.
So I guess like you said, the sluggishness is a result of the age of the stick & TV. I used to watch directly from the TV but despite Plex/Netflix & Prime being the only apps installed, it often restarted plex mid movie to free up memory, which makes me wonder what barebones hardware is inside these flashy TVs..
Be nice if they sold decent Roku sticks/boxes or TVs with decent CPUs & memory.
Yeah, I don’t know what it is with Roku, but I used to have one connected to a monitor for just a fireplace channel, but it can’t even do that anymore.
I had to give my daughter a new roku last year because another older one I had was functional, but just unusable. I believe I gave her a “Roku Express 4K” and it just rocked.
I got a “Roku Streaming Stick 4k” for Christmas for $10 that I haven’t tried yet. I’m afraid it might not direct play anything…
It sounds like you put your GPU to good use transcoding. I allow all remotes to stream original quality with the only limit being 90% of my upload speed. It works great for 1080p streaming without any transcoding. I don’t have the bandwidth to stream 4k outside the home. From what I’ve read so far, no one transcodes 4k though.
