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Depends if you're transcoding or not
if no transcoding, your pipe will be the bottleneck
else your cpu will be the bottleneck, i'd say anywhere from 5~20
that L5420 offers extremely poor performance single threaded (about the same as one of those cheap atom tablets).
you are best going for a E3 based machine.
If transcoding: 1. If not transcoding, as much as your bandwidth can handle.
Use emby and turn off transcoding
else calculate 2000 cpuscore per 1080p transcoding task....
As someone said, your pipe will slow you down if you are not transcoding. I'd have unmetered bandwidth if I was you.
This server has a 1 Gbps Port speed.
If your server has a 1gbps network port then thats around 256MB/s of true speed. a 1080p quality video requires around 6-8MB/s of network speed to be streamed properly in general, but this value can be different based on what streaming software you are using and how things are being transcoded. You definitly have to run some tests yourself to get a more 'accurate' view..
What 256MB/s?
The limit is when 125MB/s on the uplink and another one on downlink if duplex.
Then you need to deduct the TCP overhead and ....
Yeah you're right, thank you for correcting that. i dont know how i got at the 256MB/s figure..
With one c> @Mark_R said:
I think you got the streaming bandwidth wrong also, it is 6-8 Mbps, at least based on my experience with Plex, or about 1MB/s. Thus, the OP could theoretically support up to 125 simultaneous users without transcoding.
But with transcoding it is an entirely different game. Plex uses 350-380% of these CPU cores when transcoding one 1080P stream, i.e. pretty much all resources.
Or if you don't care about the diskspace usage you can also use the Sync option along with Local folder as the destination to transcode stuff in advance.
Then youll have to make sure you can handle 125MB/s of DiskIO
Here's a screenshot of my plex server starting 10 streams in chrome all encoding. For the first ~5-10 minutes it buffers the stream then it cools down.
Plex encoding is set to "hurt my cpu" (or whatever the highest value for encoding is).
Edit: CPU model was cut off in screenshot it's a 8 x Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2600K CPU @ 3.40GHz
@vfuse what storage system have you got on that?
JBOD, I don't really care if any of the drives fail. Getting stuff back on the server at 100MB/s files these drives pretty quickly
You can have probably close to about 5-10 transcodes at the same time. Depends also in your video, if it's 1080p or 720p and file size. I was able to handle 17 transcodes with my dual x5650, easily. But they all didn't start at the same second. Keep in mind it will transcode very hard right off the bat then it will keep up with the stream to keep from buffering. Just do a bunch of trial and error. I recommend though you use MP4/x264/AAC.
It used all resources if it is doing 1 transcoding or 20. It just spreads the resources out to all of the cores/resources.
My rule of thumb is to keep throughout/upload speed little above the bitrate video. Some raw videos can be as high at 20,000 bitrate (if I recall correctly). All my stuff is about 1k-2k bitrate.
Thanks everyone. I just wanted to know if I could give my server info out to my family without my watching videos being interrupted. I doubt there will be any more than 4 or 5 connections at once, unless they give it out to their friends....
Setup PlexWatch/PlexWebWatch, and if you find any users doing so then warn/remove.
Currently the only way you can do any form of limit's on Plex.
@vfuse - what monitoring software is that? Minus the disk space, I'd think you were posting screenshots of my server.
@betatester it's NIXStats
Server is a hetzner sx60 (4x4tb)