LightSpeedTaco

All this new HD content resulted in the acquisition of yet another 4 TB drive. Expect things to return to normal in half an hour or so. I’ll update this post when the work is complete. Upgrade complete! Back to business. LightSpeedTaco

Basically this is a heads up that between 12 AM and 11 AM the server will be doing backlog which means its updating old standard quality episodes and looking for their glorious 720p counterparts where available. This equates to about 4 terabytes of new data. It will take some time to complete and no doubt there will be slowdowns while this is occurring. Please let me know if the schedule is too inconvenient. LightSpeedTaco

I myself was noticing that the website was becoming rather sluggish so I pulled an all nighter for the fun and optimized the crap out of nobreaks.ca You should notice faster load times and less resources being downloaded when you visit the page. Update: You may need to click on images if they seem small to enlarge them. LightSpeedTaco

Introduction Hey guys, As promised here is a look behind the screen of Plex in particular to the software aspect of the server including the networking and NIC Teaming and the episode tracking/naming that keeps everything up to date. Networking Note the speed of the adapter being 5.0 GBps rather than the 1.0 GBps for typical gigabit ethernet interfaces. This is due to the NIC Teaming of the several Intel gigabit speed interfaces in my case. These are the adapters used however they are named differently by the drivers to allow them to run on Windows 8.1 rather than Windows Server as they were initially intended to do. The type of Team I’m utilizing is the Static Link Aggregation which is described as such. Static Link Aggregation Static Link Aggregation (SLA) is a performance technology developed to increase throughput between switches or a server and switch. This is accomplished by bundling or channeling several ports together and showing them as a single link. This increases the total bandwidth for the link and provides fault- tolerance in the event of a switch port, cable, or adapter failure. Primary and Secondary adapters can be selected for this team, but are not required.… Read More »Behind the Screen (Part 1 – Software)

Once the Plex Server finished indexing all the content from scratch I noticed a lot of incorrect matches and after all this hard work I wasn’t prepared to see all the content in disarray. One issue I found was the agent being used to acquire the metadata for the media files was basically shit. We’re talking slow, and horribly inaccurate meaning shitty looking thumbnails and backgrounds. I swapped the default agent and re-analysed all the content once again and this time, with some tweaking and bulk file renaming for easier recognition by the metadata agent it turned out beautiful. Accurate, clean and complete. Have a look in real time on the Plex or check out this screenshot from a small portion of the Movies section. Some more content is on the way but for the most part everything is all ready and stable. Because of the strain on my network I’m worried the uptime monitor will mistakenly think the server is down since it simply can’t make a connection to say “Hi, I’m still alive and kicking!” which would make the uptime ration go to hell so in a few days I’ll re-enable the uptime monitor and statistics pages for… Read More »Spit Shine