How to make Plex transcode in RAM?

[peter2cfu]

The advantage is mainly saving disk IO and bandwidth.
Be aware: Disks have a LOT worse read+write performance than read and write seperately (a factor 2 worse often)...

That makes sense as its essentially a software raid.

 

[SweetAndLow]

This is a VERY BAD way of doing it.
Why the hack do you create a zpool on a ramdisk?! You are currently caching your ramdisk in ram. Congratz.
With these kinds of setups i'm not amazed people run into weird issue tbh.

Just create a ramdisk the jail and add it to the jail fstab. No fuzz.

Right!

There is no big advantages to creating a ramdisk. Plex is designed to just store the buffer on disk.

 

[peter2cfu]

There is no big advantages to creating a ramdisk. Plex is designed to just store the buffer on disk.

I can only go by what the results are, doing this solved my problem.

 

[ornias]

That makes sense as its essentially a software raid.

It has nothing to do with being software raid.
Harddrives (the big spinny things) themselves have sucky read+write performance due to their very nature.

There is no big advantages to creating a ramdisk. Plex is designed to just store the buffer on disk.

Well, as I explained before there are advantages. If they would be big or not, really depends on your setup and requirements. It isn't for us to judge.

As a ramdisk is just blockstorage for all we care, plex would be perfectly happy with it. It doesn't require persistent blockstorage according to the documentation.

I'm very new to this 1-2 weeks max I no idea how to interpret what you said into an actionable sequence that makes sense.

I that case you might wanna ask yourself why you are messing with advanced tweaks that aren't required?

TLDR:
iocage fstab -a "$1" tmpfs /tmp_transcode tmpfs rw,size="${plex_ramdisk}",mode=1777 0 0

P.S what I have done exactly is clearly laid out above :)

I know, and as I said it's a stupid way of doing it. Don't build a pool on a ramdisk. period.

I can only go by what the results are, doing this solved my problem.

Maybe you should look into the cause of the problem and not pick one solution before finding the cause?
Something is clearly wrong with your install.

The reason transcoding would cause some jitter in some setups is them being CPU bound (the CPU needs to transcode x minutes of buffer from the new scroll position), it shouldn't be harddrive bound. If your harddrives can't handle the writes of a single transcode you have a bigger problem under the hood than just plex being slow.

 

[peter2cfu]

Thanks everyone for the useful information, I now tried FreeNAS its all is working yaaa, wanted to explore FreeNAS and unRAID with reasonable hardware and I have come to the conclusion that windows or Linux offers better value in terms of performance and hardware compatibility with the hardware I have, I left what I have done for others and they can make there own decision as to the value of it.