Server Version#: 1.13.6.5303
Player Version#: 3.65.1
PLEX Media server will not run 2 physical CPU’s anymore.
Backstory: I ran my old PLEX server on dual X5675 CPU’s and the world was great, everything ran fine. Then they came out with 4k. Well, my server struggled a little with that so I figured I would turn that server into a security recording system and build a new PLEX server. The new server was built on dual E5-2670 V2 CPU’s. Effectively doubling the raw CPU power of the old system. The new server, however, will only use one CPU at a time. Putting me back to square one… Both systems ran/run Windows Server 2012 R2.
TL:DR: PLEX won’t run both CPU’s on a dual E5-2670 V2 system. I can post logs but there are no errors since it does run fine, just pegs only 1 CPU.
Is this an issue with PLEX or Windows Server 2012 R2?
The Plex transcoder will only use 1 CPU socket for one transcoding job. The second cpu socket may be used when a second transcoding job is started concurrently.
It has always been that way. I am told it is defined by how the task scheduler of Windows is working.
Ah thats interesting. I did not know that. However, my one CPU isn’t being taxed much at all. There is hardly any usage. Same with my GPU. When I turn off HW accel, My CPU usage goes way normally.
Also, H.264 works as expected with HW accel on. I tried Emby and that works perfectly for HEVC, uses my CPU and GPU as expected.
So again, the weird part to me is when HW accel is on, while transcoding HEVC, my usage is abnormally low on my GPU and CPU(about 15% for each). Which obviously isn’t enough.
I must have worded things wrong, I am sorry for that. It used to use both CPU’s just fine on the old server. It no longer does anymore though ever since going to the new one. Not sure where that info came in about it never doing that because it did for years for me on the old server. Just trying to get back to that point.
Yes, it was the only way my old server could even do 4k. But 4k pegged it around 80-95% CPU usage, so while it was doing the one 4k video it could not do much more. Hence the upgrade.
Sorry, I cannot help you further. I only know that what you are seeing is reported by other users on Windows.
How/why this was different on your previous machine, I don’t know.
Linux uses SMP (Symmetric Multi Processing) in the kernel which unifies all the resources as “one big machine” . The concept of Processor 0 and Processor 1 disappear. It becomes " N threads " and all are available as needed.
The limitation on “Number of threads or CPUs used” is solely at the discretion of the codec. Some codecs will use more threads than other. VC-1 is a single-threaded codec and there is nothing which can be done about it. X264 can use all of what you have for decoding but it can also clamp down due to other attributes of the video. Subtitles are single-threaded for example.
