PLEASE LIKE THIS POST if you want transcoding load balancing implemented.
What:
I’d really like it for PMS to support a load balancing feature, so that PMS could combine multiple systems to transcode for my entire household. Specifically I mean a load balancing feature that would divide a transcoding session up, and splits it among the systems in the cluster.
Side Request:
Ideally such a load balancing feature should be efficiently designed, so that PMS is intelligent in that it only uses the processing power portion of on all system that’s free and not being leveraged at the moment by any other programs running on any given system in the cluster.
Why:
I have a couple of game desktops with powerful CPUs in my household doing nothing most of the time of the day: they’re only in use for like 33% of one day, and of that 33% they’re 50% used for gaming, and the other 50% used for low power tasks such as web browsing. So the CPUs of the systems are basically not being leveraged for 83% of an entire day. That’s a lot of processing power potential that could be used for load balancing a transcoding session.
And going a little on a tangent:
Also implementing a load balancing feature would be very beneficial for Plex Inc in regards to the Plex Cloud service as well. That way Plex Inc wouldn’t have to use Azure, but just rent servers at the lowest bidder themselves and dynamically scale with demand. Heck, it could even open up the possibility for Plex users world wide to voluntarily (=opt-in) offer transcoding time to each other when users have processing power and bandwidth to spare, and hypothetically earn points for perks in return.
The two points above are just brainstorm ideas of me, and not part of the main topic. Just trying to lay out as many compelling arguments to see this load balancing feature implemented.
Before anyone finds this has already been requested: from what I’ve read, a load balancing feature has been requested multiple times, but not in this specific implementation. Unlike most who’ve put out requests prior to me, I’m requesting to basically have the option to combine multiple CPUs of my systems in my household as one big CPU, and therefore split the load among the CPUs simultaneously for every single transcode. I hope this is clear on what I mean.
PLEASE LIKE THIS POST if you want transcoding load balancing implemented.
