I’ve been running plex server on an old Dell Optiplex 9020, running very well.
Ubuntu 18.04
Intel i7-4770
8GB RAM
1TB Samsung SSD (not really used for anything other than Ubuntu).
All Media stored on Synology NAS
Transcoding seemed fine. Would use anywhere from 20-50% CPU. When transcoding more than a couple of streams (remote over Internet), it would be slammed.
I’ve got the Transcoder temporary directory set to /dev/shm. This seems to work well.
I found a deal on some RAM, so I upgraded to 32GB RAM, which gives /dev/shm 16GB. Kinda cool.
Per a couple of youtubers, I also added an nVidia Quadro P400 so I could enable hardware transcoding.
I installed the nvidia 390 drivers.
Now, whether I use hardware transcoding or not, transcoding uses 100% CPU. Even when using hardware transcoding, I checked by running nvidia-smi, and I was able to see that the process “/usr/lib/plexmediaserver/Plex Transcoder” was using the nVidia card. When disabling it, that process was not using the card.
To clarify, transcoding of media is what’s affected.
Transcoding of “realtime” video from my HDHomerun seems to work well/better. Not only playing all 4 channels of the HDHomerun at once, but all of them transcoding real time (using the ramdisk) all seem to work awesome.
It’s the transcoding of the media that has now started to SLAM the CPU. Maybe not a big deal, but, just wondering if I’m doing something wrong.
DEBUG log files which capture the first few minutes of a playback session are needed to see what decisions PMS has made and the launch of the transcode session.
Clarify if the P400 or P4000 card. The P400 is not recommended for more than 1920x1080 by Nvidia.
I searched and I see a post about using Chrome. I tried that, and it didn’t look readable for some reason. Is there a place to pull logs off the server?
