Whenever someone streams from the plex server... it causes ping spikes every ~10 seconds.

[Supa]

Not sure if this is with freenas or Plex...

Some people reported that Plex DLNA was the issue... but turning that off didn't help.

- "There is another post with similar issues and it turned out to be the Plex DLNA server causing the problem. "

ping spikes even to www.google.com here http://i.imgur.com/LksDshM.png

I verified it was plex too.. any ideas?

 

[Allan Wilmath]

I would open two simultaneous terminal windows. One to do a 'top' command, and another to do pings. And see what the cpu irg% shows in the top right corner. Ideally it should be less than 1%percent. A high percentage can mean a problem with the driver or devices. Networking cards being one of the culprits. You can also see the amount of cpu time each process is using. Look for any high percentages for a clue.

 

[SweetAndLow]

This kind of sounds like a bandwidth problem. If ping latencies increase while running some kind of network workflow that means your network is getting saturated.

 

[Supa]

I would open two simultaneous terminal windows. One to do a 'top' command, and another to do pings. And see what the cpu irg% shows in the top right corner. Ideally it should be less than 1%percent. A high percentage can mean a problem with the driver or devices. Networking cards being one of the culprits. You can also see the amount of cpu time each process is using. Look for any high percentages for a clue.

Not sure where CPU irg% is... do you mean WCPU? http://i.imgur.com/ACFsG6P.png

Seems like the "Plex New Transcoder" can start pretty high around 200-300% but then it drops to around 5%

This kind of sounds like a bandwidth problem. If ping latencies increase while running some kind of network workflow that means your network is getting saturated.

Yeah Unfortunately I don't have QoS on my verizon fios router...

 

[Supa]

There's no bandwidth throttling / QoS in freenas correct?

 

[pirateghost]

There's no bandwidth throttling / QoS in freenas correct?

Nope

 

[Supa]

Nope

What about something like this?

• Enable dummynet and ipfw the FreeBSD traffic shaping module:
  • edit /boot/loader.conf and add
  • ipfw_load="YES"
  • dummynet_load="YES"
    run kldload dummynet to load the modules or just restart the server.
• Set up a pipe that restricts traffic
  • ipfw pipe 1 config bw 2000Kbps
• Send outgoing traffic destined for anywhere other than the local network through the pipe
  • ipfw add pipe 1 ip from 192.168.1.226 to 192.168.1.226 [Plex Jail IP]
• systat -ifstat 1 is used to monitor bandwidth
• You can see your pipes with ipfw pipe show (just as you see the regular rules with ipfw show.

Sources:
http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/dummynet/
http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/ip_dummynet/original.html

*********The commands below crashed my server******
For example right now I wanted to limit bittorrent traffic, so I made port 6881 to 6885 go through the pipe:

ipfw add 10 pipe 1 tcp from any to me 6881-6890
ipfw add 11 pipe 1 tcp from any 6881-6890 to me
limit the total incoming TCP traffic to 2Mbit/s, and UDP to 300Kbit/s
ipfw add pipe 2 in proto tcp
ipfw add pipe 3 in proto udp
ipfw pipe 2 config bw 2Mbit/s

well it's doing something. My friend said:

"it gave an error and said our network speed wasn't fast enough to keep up. It'll play for 5 seconds and then go black and say "loading" for like 10 seconds. Back and forth"