Ok so I've been using Unraid to host my own Jellyfin instance. I've ripped my Blu-ray collection and now I have dozens of ripped movies of around 50GB. I share these movies using Jellyfin with a couple of family members. Now sometimes these movies have to be transcoded or repackaged, reasons are irrelevant. By default this is done in the config folder in appdata on my cache drive. This can cause lots of writes and therefor wear to my SSD's.

Solution I've found on the internet: use /dev/shm to transcode in RAM. This sounds great, but I'm still hesitant to set this up. This RAM-disk has a capacity of half of the system RAM, in my case it's 32GB for the RAM-disk. Repackaging multiple Blu-ray rips at the same time quickly fills this up. What happens if it's out of memory? Will it just crash the application or is there physical storage on SSD that it will overflow to?

I've been looking at the pagefile plugin, but this seems to be for all RAM. I only need it for the /dev/shm folder. What solutions are there or is there any setup that allows me to: A - fill up /dev/shm, and B - overflow only to physical SSD storage? I'd like to keep regular RAM usage for containers and the system itself separated from the RAM-drive and not to be impacted by pagefile or anything like that.

43 minutes ago, Donrenegade said:

Ok so I've been using Unraid to host my own Jellyfin instance. I've ripped my Blu-ray collection and now I have dozens of ripped movies of around 50GB. I share these movies using Jellyfin with a couple of family members. Now sometimes these movies have to be transcoded or repackaged, reasons are irrelevant. By default this is done in the config folder in appdata on my cache drive. This can cause lots of writes and therefor wear to my SSD's.

Solution I've found on the internet: use /dev/shm to transcode in RAM. This sounds great, but I'm still hesitant to set this up. This RAM-disk has a capacity of half of the system RAM, in my case it's 32GB for the RAM-disk. Repackaging multiple Blu-ray rips at the same time quickly fills this up. What happens if it's out of memory? Will it just crash the application or is there physical storage on SSD that it will overflow to?

I've been looking at the pagefile plugin, but this seems to be for all RAM. I only need it for the /dev/shm folder. What solutions are there or is there any setup that allows me to: A - fill up /dev/shm, and B - overflow only to physical SSD storage? I'd like to keep regular RAM usage for containers and the system itself separated from the RAM-drive and not to be impacted by pagefile or anything like that.

If your jellyfin just runs out of ram-space, the transcode will fail. if the server runs out of ram, something or the whole server will go haywire.

just enable those settings in jellyfin and have a look at how much space it will consume and adjust accordingly so you have enough headroom

25 minutes ago, Mainfrezzer said:

If your jellyfin just runs out of ram-space, the transcode will fail. if the server runs out of ram, something or the whole server will go haywire.

just enable those settings in jellyfin and have a look at how much space it will consume and adjust accordingly so you have enough headroom

Thank you, this helps with most of the disk usage for Jellyfin! Quick tests show me that less data is being kept. So this has mostly helped me out. I feel more confident using this.

I do have more use-cases for using /dev/shm . Uploads of files for certain applications cause a reverse proxy like NPM to temporarily write to disk, and by default even in the docker.img. I want to change this to /dev/shm as well and i can still think of more use cases that this would be preferred and so the question still remains: Is there any way that only /dev/shm can be backed by a pagefile? Or is there any other solution for this?