LightSpeedTaco

Hey everyone! Now you may have noticed a spot of downtime today and that was a result of an upgrade to our internet connection which now tops out at a whopping 1 Gbps download and 50 Mbps upload making content delivery to you as fast as possible and increases the amount of people that can have HD content streamed to them without throttling down the quality to make sure enough bandwidth is available for all users. There is no doubt that the servers can handle plenty of utilization with about 60 Ghz of processing power available the connection was the bottleneck and very likely still is but for now we are at peak potential. Also a new addition to the system. Music! You can now use the requests system to request albums from your favourite artists and listen to them through Plex! So please, enjoy. Kind regards, The LightSpeed Team

Following a recent 3 day stint of cable making, the network is now running on shielded cat 6 networking cables that are all hand made and tested by myself. They are cut to length to minimize airflow interference. With this upgrade the potential for introduce LCAP which is link aggregation and could allow up to 4 gb/s transfer rate between the NAS and the servers thus speeding up overall speeds. This is still pending as an appropriate switch will need to be integrated. Next, the servers are crammed onto my desk and have my keyboard and mouse ontop of them. This isn’t ideal for my comfort and heat distribution/airflow for the servers themselves. Therefore some physical rearrangement will be necessary and this is the cause of the downtime. We expect to be down from 2AM EST to 8 AM EST. Keep an eye on the Nobreaks.ca twitter for details and status updates. Regards, The LightSpeed Team

Hello everyone, So the journey has lead us to some large scale processing power. Currently the data is stored and collected on the 20 bay (NAS + Expansion) storage solution with a potential of 120 TBs of protected RAID 6 storage and is now processed on a cluster of 3 Dell PowerEdge R610’s each with 9 146 GB 10K RPM 6GB/s SAS hard drives in a RAID 6 array. Each server has two Intel Xeon processors and 48 gigabytes of RAM running ESXi 6 and virtual Ubuntu 16.04 systems. Rather than having multiple plex servers I have implemented a script made by a fellow Plex user over at the Plex forums that is written in Python and in real time, load balances the transcoding of media being requested on Plex. This way, the burden of transcoding is spread out among 6 physical CPUs for the smoothest playback experience. Over on the “Is the Server Up” status page you’ll find a new link to the “Cluster Load” page which details the CPU load of each node, the number of processes running, uptime, connectivity, RAM utilization and disk usage and is updated every 5 minutes. Below are some photos of the new… Read More »From NAS to Cluster

Hey everyone, In the next 2 weeks or so I’ll be purchasing a second Dell PowerEdge R610 which will be used for both real-time load balancing for Plex as well as failover for the entire VM the Plex Media Server is hosted on. This way, if one server or VM goes down it will be shifted to the other working server. The networking is already redundant, as is the storage and soon the entire system will be. In regards to the real time load balancing, this leaves room for an unlimited amount of servers which can carry the load of transcoding and serving up media meaning a higher quality experience for you all. Regards, Team LightSpeed

Hey everyone, You may have noticed some inconsistency with the uptime of the Plex Media Server recently. This is due to some on the fly fine tuning going on involving the hardware assigned to the server’s VM instance. The NAS had 4 ethernet connections which were bonded via the QNAP control panel where the new server which also has 4 ethernet connections is bonded via ifconfig and this is where I found some issues with overhead and issues distributing load efficiently. I was also attempting to implement remote transcoding which would allow multiple physical servers to work on transcoding  together however with the recent dawn of v1.0 of Plex Media Server has thrown a wrench into the script which I haven’t been able to circumvent. For now I’m going to say things are stable and quit messing with them. Regards, Team LightSpeed