In the past month or so, I've noticed that transcodes (via a handbrake container) on my server cause both the web GUI and SMB to become laggy, unresponsive, and time-out.

The handbrake container previously had --cpu-shares=2 and APP_NICENESS set to 12. Looking for solutions I found that I should be setting --cap-add=SYS_NICE for niceness to work, so I did that and further bumped the niceness to 16. These steps had no apparent effect.

I'm not aware of any setting/configuration I've modified that could cause these issues. The server is slightly overdue for an update (7.1.4).

Any thoughts of how I could restore responsiveness while transcoding. I would rather avoid the nuclear route of denying handbrake the use of one of my CPU cores.

Still looking for help with this. The configuration was working as I wanted before so I know it's not a completely unreasonable ask.

Best bet is asking for help in the support thread for the container you are using to transcode, in case it's a known or config issue.

Thanks Jorge. I was hoping there was a more generic solution to keeping a container well behaved. This does seem to be a container specific issue as I found a toggle for the issue between different workloads today.