Offloading Plex from FreeNAS?

[Chris Dill]

I have a server running FreeNAS-11.0-U3 (c5dcf4416)
Platform Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1220 v3 @ 3.10GHz
Memory 32690MB
RAID Z2 w/ 5 WD Reds

It runs great. I have about 6 friends that stream, and I find that if all 6 of them are on, performance degrades. I know some of it is due to my upstream bandwidth being capped at 20 Mbit. But I also wonder if I could improve performance by moving Plex to a dedicated box?

FreeNAS would continue to host shares, torrent, SickBeard, Sazbnd, etc. I have a desktop gaming rig which I do not use, with a ton of RAM (no ECC), SSD's fast Core i7, and a nice GPU. Would putting Plex on this machine help my setup at all?

 

[BigDave]

I have about 6 friends that stream, and I find that if all 6 of them are on, performance degrades

If this traffic is all outgoing WAN, then your six friends need to take up a collection for you to upgrade to a faster tier.

You can easily figure 3 to 5 Mbits per second, per stream and with 6 simultaneously active connections,
I seriously doubt that moving plex to another machine would make an appreciable difference.

 

[Chris Dill]

If this traffic is all outgoing WAN, then your six friends need to take up a collection for you to upgrade to a faster tier.

You can easily figure 3 to 5 Mbits per second, per stream and with 6 simultaneously active connections,
I seriously doubt that moving plex to another machine would make an appreciable difference.

Where I live, my home office can only get Comcast. I have the highest to your Comcast Business Internet which is $220 per month. In order to grow past that I would need to go to Metro ethernet which is $7,000 per month plus 10000 or more dollars upfront construction cost. So even with my friends help I wouldn't be able to get more than I can now unfortunately.

 

[Chris Dill]

I voice typed that so some of it came out wrong. Not 7000 but several thousand

 

[styno]

You should start to identify the performance bottleneck(s) when the issue occurs. If the bottleneck is your upload speed you can invest a lot of $$ in hardware and offload whatever you want without any noticable improvements.