So I, like many, always had a question. Does PMS benefit more from having more cores…or higher clock speeds? Most can’t afford to go out and benchmark this, but recently I moved from a single processor Dell Power Edge to a dual processor Kubernetes node, and I was able to get some evidence to answer this.
First, My system specs:
Original System
Dell Poweredge R230
1x Intel Xeon E3-1280v6 @3.90 Ghz
1x 8GB DDR4 ECC RAM
2x 480GB Intel DCS3500 SSDs in RAID1
1Gb uplink (waiting on 10Gb switch)
New system
Supermicro 6027TR-DTRF 2U 2Node chassis
2x Intel E5-2630 V2 CPUs @2.6Ghz
4x 16GB Sk Hynix DDR3 16GB ECC memory sticks
4x Intel DC S3610 400GB ssds in RAID10 shared via Freenas over NFS for plexmediastore folder
The new system is running kubernetes, as I’ve moved all my old docker containers off a dedicated host onto this cluster (2 node). The only thing left standalone in my rack was the Poweredge with Plex.
Before moving to K8s, I ran a benchmark, using background transcoding (the sync option in Plex), to convert a movie (9, 1080p) to a 3Mbps 720p version.
With the E3-1280v6, the conversion took 13 minutes, 29 seconds (transcoding took place on the SSDs containing plex)
With the Dual E5-2630v2’s, using a ram drive (benchmarked at 2.4GBps using DD), the conversion took 15 minutes, 13 second, or 105 seconds longer. During this time, the system load was sitting around 15, so not maxed out (whereas the E3 was maxed at around 9-10 load).
So what did I learn? While Plex transcoding does use more cores, the speed of these cores likely matters more. I doubt ram speed was the issue, since 2.4GBps is pretty fast. I am in the process of bidding on some E5-2667v2 processors, which are 3.3Ghz pieces. If I win these I’ll benchmark again, but Overall it seems core speed matters more.
I realize this is just one test, but I thought it might help others out there looking for benchmark results. I am also aware of the passmark results everyone talks about so here are the differences:
E3-1280v6: 11371
Dual E5-2630 v2: 16073
If i can get them, here are the E5-2667v2s: 22742
