Best approach for CPU pinning on media machines

[richardb]

Hey all, I am running UnRAID 6.1.9 on my system, which has several VMs for various purposes. It's a big machine: an Asus Z9PE motherboard with 32GB of RAM and two Intel Xeon® CPU E5-2670 processors (gotta love eBay), which means 16 physical cores, and 32GB with all of that Hyperthreading nonsense.

 

I am running 4 VMs off this:

 

Work PC (pinned to 8 HT CPUs, 8GB RAM)-> ATI Radeon 7970 GFX->Displayport monitor (has 1 USB controller assigned to it)

Bedroom (pinned to 4 HT CPUs 2GB RAM)-> ATI Radeon 7950 GFX->HDMI TV, running Kodi and NextPVR

Living Room (pinned to 4HT CPUs 2GB RAM)-> ATI Radeon 7950 GFX->HDMI TV, running Kodi

Office (pinned to 4HT CPUs 4GB RAM)-> NVidia GT730-> HDMI monitor (has 1 USB controller assigned to it)

 

However, I am really struggling to make this system work reliably. Although it has processor power to spare, the media PCs (Bedroom and Living Room) seem to struggle to show a HD video stream: intemittently, it gets glitchy and stuttery. I am guessing that this is to do with the way the processors are assigned. I am using the CPUs setting in the template, assigning the Hyperthreading pairs. So, the XML for Bedroom, for instance, looks like this:

 

 <vcpu placement='static'>4</vcpu>
  <cputune>
    <vcpupin vcpu='0' cpuset='6'/>
    <vcpupin vcpu='1' cpuset='7'/>
    <vcpupin vcpu='2' cpuset='22'/>
    <vcpupin vcpu='3' cpuset='23'/>
  </cputune>

 

(the CPUs are numbered 0 to 31, and the dashboard gives me the pairing of 0,16 then 1,17 for the huperthreading pairs).

 

So what are your thoughts on the best way to set these machines up so that each has a sufficient amount of processing power? I've read through the FAQs and pinned discussions, but haven't found much that might explain what is going on here.