Dedicated Server for Plex, need an upgrade

Off Topic & General Discuss
#1

I’m currently renting one of these from hetzner with ACD:

Intel Core i7-3770
HDD2x HDD 3,0 TB SATA
RAM2x RAM 8192 MB DDR3

it’s running Ubuntu 16.04 and Quickbox with a lot of the apps. I’ve got 10 people using the PMS and I’m worried that performance is soon going to be affected if I add more people. Currently the server peaks at 7 concurrent streams, and the server has only shown strain once, where it couldn’t handle it.

This box currently costs 27 EURO p/m to rent. I’m thinking of possibly renting a second box for the next batch of people I add but that means double the maintenance :confused: The other option is to get a stronger box that can handle more concurrent streams. The problem with that is that the high end boxes are quite a lot more expensive.

I’ve seen guys who have hit the 100 person limit on the PMS and they do it from ONE server. How do they even do that?

Has anyone else had this problem? What is the best bang for buck solution?

#2

hello @KaMoS69,

They can reach 100 people simply because they forbid any transcoding :wink:
You can do the test by your self, one night when the server will be free, start 7 streams from devices which support x264 (mkv) files. The stream will be “direct stream” and you will see that your CPU’s load is very low.

I’m trying to give to my users some RaspberryPi with PMP or Rasplex to avoid transcoding.

And an advice, if you need it, you should take a more powerful server, it will be less complex to manage than 2 separate servers.

1 Like
#3

Thanks for the advice. I’m leaning towards getting something more powerful.

I’m also looking at renting some rack space and putting in my own hardware. Is it worthwhile for my application?