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Will the presentation be available online anywhere? This topic is very interesting to me as I maintain a Plex server for my family and have always been curious

by lprd 5y ago

Will the presentation be available online anywhere? This topic is very interesting to me as I maintain a Plex server for my family and have always been curious how Netflix does streaming at scale.

antman 5y ago
How large is your family?
- lokimedes 5y ago
  Just the closest /16 and a few friends.
- lprd 5y ago
  Haha, not large at all! I've just built a couple of servers and their main responsibility is content storage and then content serving (transcoding). My main bottleneck right now is that I don't have 10Gbps switches (both servers have dual 10Gbps intel NICs ready to go). I have to do some throttling so that users don't experience any buffering issues.
  - bduhan 5y ago
    Have you tried using a crossover cable and static IPs to link the two servers directly?
    - stepbeek 5y ago
      FYI if using modern hardware then you might not need a specific cable to try this thanks to Auto MDI-X: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium-dependent_interface#Auto_MDI-X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium-dependent_interface#Aut...
erk__ 5y ago
At some point the presentations will come up here https://www.youtube.com/c/EuroBSDcon https://www.youtube.com/c/EuroBSDcon
drewg123 5y ago
There is a EuroBSDCon youtube channel. The last time I presented, it was a few weeks before the recordings were processed and posted to the channel. I'm not sure how soon they will be available this year. I have to say that a lot of this may be overkill for plex. Do you know if plex even uses sendfile?
- lprd 5y ago
  It's 100% overkill, haha! I was just asking because streaming architecture really interests me. I have two nodes (one is TrueNAS with ~50tb of storage), and the other is a compute machine (all SSDs) which consumes the files on the NAS and delivers the content. My biggest bottleneck right now is that my internal network isn't 10Gpbs, so I have to throttle some services so that users don't experience any buffering issues. Truenas also introduced me to ZFS and I have been amazed by it so far! I haven't dug to deep into FreeBSD yet, but that's next on my list.
  - drewg123 5y ago
    One thing to remember with ZFS is that it does not use the page cache; it uses ARC. This means that sendfile is not zero-copy with ZFS, and I think that async sendfile may not work at all. We use ZFS only for boot/root/logs and UFS for content.
    - lprd 5y ago
      Very interesting, I had no idea. Would adding something like an intel optane help performance for large transfers with a lot of I/O? I manage my services with a simple docker-compose file and establish the data link to my NAS via NFS, which I’m sure is adding another layer of complexity (I believe NFSv4 is asynchronous?).
      - onedr0p 5y ago
        Short answer: no There's a lot of blogs that go over this in detail for our usecase at home. Your can do it but you will not see much improvements if any at all.

by lprd 5y ago

Will the presentation be available online anywhere? This topic is very interesting to me as I maintain a Plex server for my family and have always been curious how Netflix does streaming at scale.

antman 5y ago

How large is your family?

lokimedes 5y ago
Just the closest /16 and a few friends.
lprd 5y ago
Haha, not large at all! I've just built a couple of servers and their main responsibility is content storage and then content serving (transcoding). My main bottleneck right now is that I don't have 10Gbps switches (both servers have dual 10Gbps intel NICs ready to go). I have to do some throttling so that users don't experience any buffering issues.
- bduhan 5y ago
  Have you tried using a crossover cable and static IPs to link the two servers directly?
  - stepbeek 5y ago
    FYI if using modern hardware then you might not need a specific cable to try this thanks to Auto MDI-X: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium-dependent_interface#Auto_MDI-X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium-dependent_interface#Aut...

erk__ 5y ago

At some point the presentations will come up here https://www.youtube.com/c/EuroBSDcon https://www.youtube.com/c/EuroBSDcon

drewg123 5y ago

There is a EuroBSDCon youtube channel. The last time I presented, it was a few weeks before the recordings were processed and posted to the channel. I'm not sure how soon they will be available this year. I have to say that a lot of this may be overkill for plex. Do you know if plex even uses sendfile?

lprd 5y ago
It's 100% overkill, haha! I was just asking because streaming architecture really interests me. I have two nodes (one is TrueNAS with ~50tb of storage), and the other is a compute machine (all SSDs) which consumes the files on the NAS and delivers the content. My biggest bottleneck right now is that my internal network isn't 10Gpbs, so I have to throttle some services so that users don't experience any buffering issues. Truenas also introduced me to ZFS and I have been amazed by it so far! I haven't dug to deep into FreeBSD yet, but that's next on my list.
- drewg123 5y ago
  One thing to remember with ZFS is that it does not use the page cache; it uses ARC. This means that sendfile is not zero-copy with ZFS, and I think that async sendfile may not work at all. We use ZFS only for boot/root/logs and UFS for content.
  - lprd 5y ago
    Very interesting, I had no idea. Would adding something like an intel optane help performance for large transfers with a lot of I/O? I manage my services with a simple docker-compose file and establish the data link to my NAS via NFS, which I’m sure is adding another layer of complexity (I believe NFSv4 is asynchronous?).
    - onedr0p 5y ago
      Short answer: no There's a lot of blogs that go over this in detail for our usecase at home. Your can do it but you will not see much improvements if any at all.