Hello Everyone,
Below are my current specs for my plex server and was wondering if this is sufficient for 10 to 15 users (typically 2 to 5 users on at a time) to run 720p or even 1080 content to all of the users. I was thinking about building a completely new machine/server to run plex on but if this is still sufficient enough or maybe if i need to find a video card (not sure if that will make a difference) to put in i can do that.
I’m running VMware ESXI and i have windows server running plex and i have a ubuntu server i’m using for SVN for my programming projects. I was thinking about getting LIMETECH due to suggestion from a friend but I don’t know much about it.
The base machine is a PowerEdge T710
2x Intel® Xeon® CPU X5570 @ 2.93GHz (2 sockets, 4 cores per socket, 16 Logical Processors)
23.99 GB of ram, having issues putting more in and am trying to figure out why (something i’m troubleshooting)
1TB hdd ( I plan on buying a couple of extra drives at some point.
Thanks
I would say that should still be fine for 2-5 people assuming the files are not crazy high bitrate. If 10-15 try to at the same time you would be in trouble lol.
If by LIMETECH you mean unRAID then that is actually what i run myself. I run it because it is far less picky about what hardware you run it on (compared to ESX) and i didnt care for the 8vcpu limit in the free version of ESX. Also i really like the storage capabilities of unRAID
Remember transcoding is a ‘thread-speed’ limited task more than it is a number-of-threads task. The sequence of decode- transcode - encode - remux is finite. At some point in the sequence (usually the encode) is where the bottleneck will occur. This is where the integer Passmarks make a difference.
Are the users all local?
If some are remote what is your net speed up?
And saying 720p and 1080p is like saying how long is a piece of string.
And I can unequivocally say some will work!
Which ones? Well, there is the task.
Most of the time 2 to 3 are local the rest would be outside my network. I speed consists of a 280 to 300 Mbps (36.9 meg) down, and 22 to 25 Mb/s (2.8ish megs) upload. The server has a 10 gig backbone and all my network in house is CAT6.
i did not think about the openess of saying 720 and 1080 
It depends on the quality that I rip my dvd’s or home videos with. I’m about to put my ram up to 42 or 46 gigs and I’m debating on using unRaid but i’m not familiar with it so more research. From what i can tell i will need a 6tb drive for media, 6tb drive for cache and another drive for parody but that is research i will have to bring to the unraid boards i’m sure.
I just want to make sure i’m not wasting time getting all the extra drives for the server and the server be pointless to use. I know an acquaintance recently spent about 1200 dollars building a similar server but AMD seems to be doing fine but i’m not sure exactly how many users he has on plex.
I greatly appreciate your input guys.
Ok your net speeds may be ok.
Your rig should perform well (passmarks for your dual CPU is 9601)
And getting more ram will make no difference to Plex .
With your setup I say it’s all about the media.
High bitrate MKV will cause you grief.
Use the hardware you have and re-encode a few movies and see what works.
e.g. the biggest h264 mp4 movie I have is 4gb and are all under 4000bps bitrate
Ok thank you, most of what i have is under 3000 kbps bitrate. I will copy a few higher bitrate files over to the server, setup a second plex server on it and play the media on multiple devices and see what happens. Then i will look at re-encoding the needed ones to a lower bitrate.
Thanks for the great info. Looks like I need to drop down a lot of my files to at least 4000 bitrate to be on the safe side.
Is the best way to stress test the server with plex to just have 10 or so devices all streaming different quality files like mobile, pc, tablets?
That’s the real practical test but the media size/bitrate/format is relevant.
Do u have 10 clients ?
I say try it - no reviews, or posts here can test your setup…
i had 7 devices running just fine on 3 to 4k bitrate media files for a few hours on different videos and duplicate files. So i should be okay. I suppose i can slowly start converting the ones that are higher to smaller bitrates just for peace of mind. I have 9 total users on plex. The most i have seen at 1 time using it was 5.
Thank you all so much for the input, all of your answers answered my questions 
