Updates & Plex reinstall on thursday - Bytesized Hosting

Hey guys,

In my previous news-item I already talked about some of the stability issues and the main purpose of this beta.

Today I've been working on some new tools to further help stability along.

Plex cpu balancing

Currently Plex is very hungry cpu-wise, it knows the server has a ton of cores so it's not shy when starting a transcode to use a lot of them. This can cause peak cpu usage which is not really needed. That's why I decided to give each Plex instance access to four cores. This should make sure cpu usage gets divided more evenly and hopefully prevent Plex from being to greedy. Sadly this does mean that all Plex instances need to be reinstalled. I will remove all Plex apps on Thursday morning (GMT+1) so if you wake-up make sure to reinstall it, and tie it to your Plex account so the IP doesn't matter anymore.

Kernel

I've upgraded to the latest Ubuntu LTS kernel this morning. Although it should help one of the bugs we were trying to address was not fixed yet in this release. A new official kernel release seems almost ready though so I have high hopes we can patch that final kernel bug later this week, this also means an other server restart.

Filebot

I've had to manually kill Filebot a few times these past days, some of you might have had some of your content not showing up in Plex, this might have been why. Filebot, the tool that does all the renaming and symlinking so Plex understands your content, seems to sometimes just lock-up and suck up all the CPU. I hope that it might be solved by the kernel upgrades but just in case I wrote a small monitoring script that should kill any Filebot process that goes haywire. Luckily today it didn't have to come into access yet.

That's all for now, more to follow :)

Ani