That’s actually quite a lot for a relatively modest server. Lidarr in particular seems to be quite a memory pig. And even if the servers don’t seem to be doing things, they probably are actually doing quite a bit. The *arr servers in particular are constantly watching RSS feeds for stuff to download.
Among other things you’re probably starving Unraid of cache memory which is doing to severely degrade disk performance. Try shutting down everything except Plex and see how things go.
The quick/easy (but not guaranteed) fix would be to add more memory to the server. As much as you can afford and the server will take. I’m not an expert on PC hardware but you should be able to double that to 64GB.
Longer term I’d recommend moving some of the services to 2nd server. I’d probably leave Unraid, Plex, and Tautulli on the current server. Move everything else to the 2nd server. Personally I’d buy a refurbished server off of eBay. Going with a Xeon processor means you can get a lot more memory into a chassis. AMD server processors are fine too but older Xeons are very inexpensive. Most of the things you want to run don’t need a great deal of CPU but are relatively memory hungry.
Is the video being direct streamed, as Tautulli suggests, or is it being transcoded to SD, as the Plex Dashboard suggests? Transcoding a 1080p H.265 encoded video to SD H.264 is a fairly resource-intensive task. If that is indeed what’s happening, I wouldn’t be terribly surprised with that system struggling a bit.
If it is being transcoded, you can try to determine the reason and eliminate it. It could be bandwidth-related; or, it could be that the client isn’t capable of direct playing it (though I think a Roku Ultra is). If Plex thinks the client is remote for some reason, it will apply whatever bandwidth restrictions you have configured on the server and client, which could result in the video being transcoded. In the Plex dashboard, does it show Local or Remote during playback?
It may be helpful to see the server logs from a stream which exhibits the problem (debug logging enabled, verbose logging disabled).
[Still posting even though it’s similar to what @pshanew posted as I was typing this up]
I’d probably start here and change your settings in the Roku so that you are not transcoding an HD stream down to a really low SD quality (320 Kbps/0.3 Mbps based on what you provided). Even though h.265/x.265/HEVC is more efficient at compressing, my understanding is that it takes more processing power to decode it (I could be wrong/off about that as haven’t done much additional looking into of this) but if that’s the case your server is not able to transcode fast enough (based on what you supplied, the Transcode (Speed: 0.3) from Tautulli clues us in on that. Read this article about it: https://support.plex.tv/articles/201575036-why-is-my-video-stream-buffering/ (under the section “Check the transcoding speed”).
My guess if you set your client to be able to play the full stream and your network/Wi-Fi can handle it, you probably won’t have the buffering.
Thanks for the quick reply. I don’t see RAM being the issue. I can monitor RAM while Plex is transcoding. I can monitor all performance metrics in fact. None of them spike, at all. RAM usage max, with all those containers running is max 15% used. Further, I’ve been an UnRaid user for about 5 years now. This is the first I’ve ever heard that those containers are resource intensive. Only Sabnzbd has ever been and that’s only when performing an unpacking. I thought a 2700X was kind of OP for what I’m using it for.
OK, sorry about that, and sorry for getting back so long after. But life.
So, couple of things. At first I wanted to give you some clean logs, so I went into my container and deleted the logs, then restarted Plex. I went about starting the movie that had been having so many problems, one of, and of course… nothing. Hummed along like a champ. No stutter, no buffer, no telling me my server isn’t powerful enough.
So, I decided to at least push the server to see if it helped. I ran four movies (could have done more). One was a 4k transcode, and the other 3 were movies I know that we’ve had issues with similar to the other one mentioned above. No issues at all. All four movies played. It put a small tax on my server, I saw 50% utilization out of the CPU and the Ram, 30 ish%. Nothing crazy.
So, with that said, I went ahead and included the logs I took after playing the four movies. I expect this will happen again in a few days when I’m least expecting it.
Thanks for any help. Quick note… I quickly parsed the files and changed some identifiables such as name, user, public ip, to something else. If it’s needed for any reason, just let me know.
When you catch it again , please include the problematic logs.
I’ll give you a direct reply path if you wish at that time for privacy. Please let me know.
It’s not unreasonable to see the Ryzen spin up as it did performing the conversion on a number of DCA audio streams to AAC.
So far, this looks good and will serve as a nice baseline when it next goes sideways
