Hi all,

 so on my main server I have 8gig of ram. I run 4 dockers, Sonarr, NzbGet, SazBnd and Coachpotato. When I look at the main dashboard in unRAID it shows memory usage at 28% but when I look at memory usage via the stats plugin it shows only 1 gig free with the rest mostly as cached. 
 My question, should I add more ram or will unRAID just cache any additional ram that I install? When I am copying large sets of data to the server and streaming tv shows I get buffering. My whole network is 1gig and I have recently added a managed CISCO 24 port switch and also a 4 port intel NIC (still only using a single port on the card at present)

Will extra memory help? From what I have read my network should easily be able to handle streaming and moving large files to the server at the same time.

Thoughts?
Patrick

1 hour ago, crowdx42 said:

My question, should I add more ram or will unRAID just cache any additional ram that I install?

unused RAM is wasted RAM.  If no app requires the memory, unRaid will automatically utilize it as a memory cache.  If an app requires it, the cache will get released.

 

So then adding memory will not help?

It's hard to say.  What are the remaining specs of your server?  And when streaming, are you transcoding?

The server is intel i5 on a Z97 motherboard with 8 gig PC3200 memory, 1tb x 2 cache drive in RAID 1. The stream is direct, no transcoding just straight 720/1080p stream of the original file. I use Kodi on a NUC in the living room. The NUC is connected via Cat 6 back to a CISCO managed switch. I also have 14 ip cameras on the same network most arer POE and are hooked into the network via TP Link POE 1gig switches which are plugged back to the CISCO switch. All the routing is done with an ASUS RT-AC68U .

 

Well extra memory can't hurt.  Whether it will help depends on whether you are I/O bound.  Are the writes going to cache or directly to the array?  Do you have turbo write enabled?  Are the cameras writing to your unRAID server?

Cameras are going to a dedicated PC on the network running Blue Iris software. None of the camera data gets stored on the server, just on the dedicated PC, so the only bandwidth it takes is from the camera to the dedicated pc.

Did you have this problem before you added the new switch?  My guess is that extra memory won't help (though as I said early, it wouldn't hurt either).  You didn't mention, but I assume the large files are being written to your cache drive.  You have enough CPU and SATA bandwidth to handle both writing a large file to cache and streaming from an array drive.  My guess is that network bandwidth is the issue.  I can saturate a 1GB network writing files from my main PC to my unRAID server.  I would have hoped that the read and write streams would have played more nicely with each other but who knows?  Can you see how fast the writes are, or do you have Dynamix System Statistics loaded, or any kind of management interface into the switch?

Well I originally thought that adding a 4 port NIC would help if my main PC was saturating the single NIC but folk here were dubious about bonding the NIC. I am not rethinking after watching another user on Youtube showing his setup and how he bonded two nics to get better sustained writes to the array.

For large files I am pretty sure I am hitting the max throughput for a 1 gig NIC.