Any possible upgrades for my Gen8 microserver?

[paradoxiom]

Dashboard screenshot:

I think RAM is my limiting factor right now, it only has two ram slots, 16gb total so 8gb sticks in each - is it possible to upgrade these to higher capacity sticks? is my CPU a bottleneck? I use it mainly for plex streaming and lately it is starting to lag, I am running 2x chromecast audio on my network and having plex stream audioto them 24/7 but after about half an hour the system becomes bogged down and restarting the jail doesn't help, a complete reboot is the only thing to get everything back to running snappy again.

thanks in advance.

 

[KrisBee]

Short answer to your questions is no. You've maxed out the RAM and fitted a powerful CPU with a 8856 passmark. I don't use PLEX, but I can't see why the CPU would be a bottleneck. But have you modded the fanless CPU heat sink? You're running a CPU whose TDP is 69W with a heatsink designed for 35W CPUs. How do you know you are not getting thermal throttling, for example? What checks, if any, have you made to ensure adequate system cooling and stability?

When you say "and lately it is starting to lag" is this after upgrading from FN11.1 to FN11.2 and/or a change in system load? As you have a predictable issue, I guess people will ask how/what are you monitoring in order to help pinpoint the problem?

 

[paradoxiom]

Short answer to your questions is no. You've maxed out the RAM and fitted a powerful CPU with a 8856 passmark. I don't use PLEX, but I can't see why the CPU would be a bottleneck. But have you modded the fanless CPU heat sink? You're running a CPU whose TDP is 69W with a heatsink designed for 35W CPUs. How do you know you are not getting thermal throttling, for example? What checks, if any, have you made to ensure adequate system cooling and stability?

When you say "and lately it is starting to lag" is this after upgrading from FN11.1 to FN11.2 and/or a change in system load? As you have a predictable issue, I guess people will ask how/what are you monitoring in order to help pinpoint the problem?

Yeah I've got a heatsink with a fan on there instead of the stock passive heatsink.

"When you say "and lately it is starting to lag" is this after upgrading from FN11.1 to FN11.2 and/or a change in system load? As you have a predictable issue, I guess people will ask how/what are you monitoring in order to help pinpoint the problem?"

This is only after having it stream music to my chromecast audio devices 24/7 which I only got last week, until then it was *mostly fine* (recent plex updates (or the freenas v11) made it need a full reboot after a while, but nowhere near as much until I started streaming music from it. After an hour or so it slows to a crawl. I'd love to figure out why it's happening.

https://imgur.com/a/bM3bm My server
Can't find any pics with the heatsink mod i'll dig around..

Edit: here we go https://homeservershow.com/forums/topic/14770-my-56tb-gen8-rebuild-wpics/

 

[KrisBee]

Never used plex or chromecast, so what are you monitoring when your system performance slows: e.g. CPU usage, memory usage, swap usage, process hogs, etc?

 

[JaimieV]

I run an older gen Microserver, N54L, much slower than yours (dual core 2.2GHz AMD Turion 25W) which manages dual stream video Plex much of the time and doesn't have any lagging issues. Looking at your pics, RAM could well be the issue as you seem to have two 4x6TB disk arrays and a 4x2TB array? That's a lot of terabytes for 16gig to handle with Plex which eats 2-4gig for itself.

You may need to de-fluff the Microserver too :)