SOLVED Memory requirements with little storage (home use)

[Fil]

So I'm fairly new to FreeNAS but have played around with it for the good part of 3 months in a virtual machine. I am very happy with how the interface works and the power behind ZFS in general.

I finally got around to building my own dedicated box yesterday and I opted for 8GB of memory as it's all I could afford (and the "official" minimum from my understanding). I have 3x1TB drives in RAIDZ1 as my storage requirements are minimal. I haven't enabled any of the obvious memory killing features such as de-duplication but am interested in running a Plex jail on FreeNAS.

My question is, should 8GB of memory be enough for a single jail (Plex can use 1-2GB of RAM)? I really don't care if my ARC-hit ratio goes to crap since I rarely ever move large files back and forth between my PC and NAS. I've heard of horror stories of people trying to use FreeNAS with less than 8GB of memory and encountering nothing but issues. At the same time, a lot of lighter users supposedly have no issues using less than 8GB.

 

[danb35]

Plex is less of a memory hog than it used to be (it crashed my old server with 32 GB of RAM and ~ 60 GB of swap on more than one occasion), but I still wouldn't feel good about running it much on a system with only 8 GB. Without that, you'd almost certainly be fine. It's almost certainly safe to try it, but don't be surprised if it isn't very stable.

 

[depasseg]

I would imagine 8GB would be ok for just running 2TB of data and a Plex jail.

 

[Fil]

Plex is less of a memory hog than it used to be (it crashed my old server with 32 GB of RAM and ~ 60 GB of swap on more than one occasion), but I still wouldn't feel good about running it much on a system with only 8 GB. Without that, you'd almost certainly be fine. It's almost certainly safe to try it, but don't be surprised if it isn't very stable.

What is the worst that can happen, there is no risk of losing my Pool if I don't quite have enough is there? I know my memory cache will no longer be fulfilled.

 

[nojohnny101]

I'm going to add my 2 cents and say you will probably be fine. What else do you do with your server and would multiple people be accessing the server while a stream is possibly ongoing?

 

[danb35]

Yeah, your data should be safe. If you have problems, I'd expect them to be on the order of poor performance.

 

[Fil]

Yeah, your data should be safe. If you have problems, I'd expect them to be on the order of poor performance.

Thanks, just double checking! :)

 

[Fil]

I'm going to add my 2 cents and say you will probably be fine. What else do you do with your server and would multiple people be accessing the server while a stream is possibly ongoing?

At most there are 2 people using it, but it's literally only for files 50mb or less most of the time. The majority of usage will be streaming with Plex.

 

[nojohnny101]

Well it certainly won't hurt to try it out! You should be fine.