I have a QNAP TS-253D (Celeron J4125, 4GB RAM) hosting all my files. I used to have Jellyfin running on it in a Docker container, but it performed really poorly (which is expected ig). It used to take forever to stream a 1080p movie, and seeking back and forth would freeze the whole thing.
Then I moved my Jellyfin setup to my desktop PC (i9-10850k, 16GB RAM, 2080 Super), the files are still on my NAS. It performs much better now, streaming is a breeze and it almost never freezes or anything.
Problem is, it eats up all my RAM. My RAM usage is 99% almost all the time someone uses Jellyfin and it significantly hampers my regular work on my desktop. I can upgrade my RAM to 32 or 64 GB, but would that solve the problem?
If not, what is the cheapest mini PC or home setup that I can do that’d free up my desktop but still give me similar or at least good enough performance?
Thank you for your advice.
Fyi this sub here is about selfhosting software services, not about any hardware purchase or upgrade advice.
Consider subs like /r/HomeServer /r/Homelab /r/BuildaPC for that.
Then you goto homelab and homeserver and they tell you X and Y things and bitch and moan about power usage. Or they suggest things that logically don’t line up with what OP wants/needs. Or they will say lines like “for just a little more” about 10 times until a build is $1000 or more.
Lets try to be helpful instead of just pushing people other places…hmm?
Very odd: on my computer it never uses more than 1GB of RAM. As for the limitations of your first setup, that sounds like a bottleneck when it comes to transcoding, which can occur because of a lack of GPU or CPU power, depending on whether or not you had hardware acceleration enabled. I would expect it to run much better on your new setup, but the RAM thing is worth investigating. I was running Jellyfin on 12GB of RAM until recently, and never hit 100% usage.
Are you running any 4k content or just 1080p? How many users?
I don’t have any 4k content. Maybe one or two movies among a thousand. I have about 4 regular users.
Map this guy to your NAS. Load up Plex/Jellyfin dockers with /dev/dri mapped for Intel QuickSync. Nice and easy.
I run Plex on an N100 MiniPC, including hardware transcoding. I have the media in another system running TrueNAS.
How do you connect the 2 machines together? This is something I’ve been interested in doing so I can technically keep expanding by adding more “carriers”.
Make sure you get a box that can be upgraded to at least 32GB, made that mistake got the beelink s12 pro, not enough with 16GB.
16 runs fine for me. I transcode to an SSD and run home assistant and airsonic and emulatorjs and immich and frigate and monitoring software like glances and uptimekuma and and and.
Ram is at 70%, could use more, 8 isn’t enough but 16 will get you going
Transcoding what? UHD? Atmos? Or something else.
I’m looking for a cheap solution since 1 tv in my household needs those files transcoded and my NAS can’t 😞
I run Jellyfin on a laptop that was too slow to use for anything else and an external hard drive. Intel Celeron N3060, 2 cores, 2 threads, less than 4gb ram, 32gb eMMC storage.