I have a Synology DS918 with the standard RAM of (I believe) 4 GB, I haven’t upgraded. At some point in the past I tried to use the RAM as a temporary directory but after seeing no difference I removed that from the PLEX settings by blanking it out.
But months later I’m noticing the RAM is being utilized by PLEX so much that Synology is giving me warnings, and I’m not even sure these are related. If anyone can give me a hint as to what else I need to change I’d appreciate it. Stopping the PLEX app on the server and starting it again removes all the RAM storage for a while. Also, this is a problem even when PLEX isn’t currently being used to watch anything.
Thanks for the reply. No, the image I show is sorted by memory usage and the next two apps shown running are far less. I guess the combination of all the rest of the apps is the 32%
When I took those screen shots I’d checked and Plex wasn’t doing anything. As I mentioned I’ve caught it in this situation multiple times (Plex using nearly all the RAM and doing nothing) which makes me think there’s a setting I need to check.
For example, the field I mentioned about using RAM for temporary files is blank now, but do I need to have a location on the drive specified to keep it from defaulting to the last location (RAM)? I don’t remember what was in that field before I changed it to the designation for RAM and maybe I need to put that back.
I’ll do that when I get back home this afternoon. Thanks.
And that’s true, I may be assuming nothing is going on since the little indicator in the top right isn’t showing anything, which is all I’m basing that statement on. When it does intro detection and similar stuff it shows that it’s busy.
As for what I put in that field to use RAM instead of HDD I’ll try and look it up here. I don’t remember what the exact text I used, I think it was similar to “\tmp” or something like that, but I’ll get back to you on that as well.
Clearly I was unaware, because I followed that as a suggestion. However, when I realized it wasn’t working I removed it as shown above.
And that’s how it is on my server now. So does this mean that this is 100% not the source of the high RAM usage? If so, it’s good to know and I can look elsewhere. Maybe the logs will help, as you suggested earlier. I’ll be able to provide those to you when I get home tonight.
You don’t have to get snippy. Yes, I was able to read the message. Yes, I understood it to be a DIRECTORY. Clearly I thought the DIRECTORY would be located on the RAM chip within memory. But, as I’ve said multiple times already I realized it wasn’t helping so I removed it.
I’m satisfied that the RAM is not being used currently because of this. Hopefully someone else will be able to help me instead of trying to rub my nose in a mistake that I made and corrected previously.
1, NAS devices rarely benefit from using a RAM disk for transcoding due to the limited amount of memory which is or can be installed.
2. Transcoding using the HDDs, on a RAID-based NAS is typically several hundred MB/sec (assume 150 MB/sec * Number of drives).
3. Converting disk MB/sec -> video is a 1:8 expansion meaning this would be about 1200 Mbps ( equivalent to six 200 Mbps videos playing concurrently and more than these CPUs can generate )
The point I’m making here is, for NAS platforms, placing the transcoder temporary directory on any location, other than the default, does not result in a net gain by causing more issues than were first perceived.
To speak to the thread’s issue:
Are there any other applications running on the NAS (Synology or other third party)?
I will screenshot the full list of what is running and post it here tonight once I get home from work. There are some additional things, but as you can see in the original post Plex is by far the biggest RAM hog and it hasn’t always been this way.
If this is normal then I guess I’ve just never noticed before. Do you think adding another 4 GB of RAM will help the server? I’d heard otherwise but it seems like it might.
PMS on Synology often uses up to about 2 GB of RAM depending on what it’s doing at the moment.
If you expand the arrow, you’ll see what PMS’s sub-processses are actually using.
We’ve found that Synology NAS systems work the best with about 8GB of RAM in them ( a matched kit – 2x 4GB of the same Vendor part number).
What that gives you is a slight memory access speed boost in the form of Dual Channel access. (It can be reading from one DIMM while writing to the other, etc). It’s not blazing but I’ve been able to squeeze 5-10% out of it which does help for memory ops.
If you can get a kit, or another 4GB from Synology, it will settle down.
Something not tangible but still observable, hardware transcoding ‘feels’ better. I’ve always suspected it’s because, with the extra memory, it can use the Dual Channel mode
It was about a week ago that I last restarted PMS, which was when I last noticed the RAM being used this much. If I stop the Plex server and start it again the usage drops nearly all the way down. I haven’t done a lot of specific testing to see how long it takes to creep back up or what makes it do it. All I know is that I didn’t used to see the usage this high all the time and recently (the past couple of months) it’s that high whenever I happen to look.
Based on the conversation above I’ve ordered two of the 8 GB RAM cards which will arrive on Wednesday. If Plex is only supposed to use to about 2 GB, depending on what it’s doing, I should definitely be okay with 16 GB. It can use more when needed and then drop down to 2 and the server won’t seem like it’s RAM is being overly utilized as often.
