Slow Upstream Network Speeds

[Jackn123]

Hello all,

I just built a new PC / unRAID server and got everything up and running this week. Everything seems fine except playback from my Plex server, both in my home and away, has been extremely bad with constant buffering. I have gigabit fiber in my home and consistently get 7 or 800mb download and upload speeds on the network. My server, which has a gigabit NIC is connected via cat6 to a gigabit switch and then directly into my router. The other computers on the same switch are able to achieve the above mentioned speeds.  So with that in mind, i used the speedtest plugin to test the connection speed and the results consistently show 6-700mb downstream but only 60-80mb upstream. 

 

Does anyone have any idea what would be causing this? I'm hoping it's just a network configuration issue!

And secondarily, does anyone agree with me that this could be the reason i'm getting bad streaming performance from Plex? I have a Ryzen 5 3600 6core cpu, so it should be more than capable of any required transcoding, no? 

 

Ethtool yeilds the below results, so I know that my network connection speed is being registered properly.  

 

Settings for eth0:
        Supported ports: [ TP ]
        Supported link modes:   10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full 
                                100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full 
                                1000baseT/Full 
        Supported pause frame use: Symmetric
        Supports auto-negotiation: Yes
        Supported FEC modes: Not reported
        Advertised link modes:  10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full 
                                100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full 
                                1000baseT/Full 
        Advertised pause frame use: Symmetric
        Advertised auto-negotiation: Yes
        Advertised FEC modes: Not reported
        Speed: 1000Mb/s
        Duplex: Full
        Port: Twisted Pair
        PHYAD: 1
        Transceiver: internal
        Auto-negotiation: on
        MDI-X: off (auto)
        Supports Wake-on: pumbg
        Wake-on: g
        Current message level: 0x00000007 (7)
                               drv probe link
        Link detected: yes

[testdasi]

Firstly, if speed test shows 60-80 Mbps upload then it's a problem with your ISP presumably.

 

Secondly, what do you mean by "playback from my Plex server"? What's the client? What's the bitrate and codec of the content? Any transcoding? Any disk write activity happening in the background e.g. parity sync, mover etc.? What's your CPU core load / usage level when media being played?

[Jackn123]

The same speedtest run from outside of the unraid server yields upload speeds of 600-800Mbps, so it isn't an ISP problem. 

 

On the playback, if I try to stream a video to my phone (galaxy s10+), for example, while connected to my extremely fast wifi in the house, it buffers constantly. The specific file that I was trying last night was a 1080p 24 fps / 9.2 Mbps / H264 4.0 High video. I had the quality set to 720p, 4 Mbps in the player. That shouldn't be a heavy lift at all for such a fast network with all brand new hardware. 

 

CPU core load when playing the media, based on looking at the dashboard, was bout 50-55%. There were no other disk activities going on at that moment.