Poor Performance on PowerEdge R720xd


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I built a new server a few months back thinking it was going to handle everything I needed as my storage/media server.

My results have been mediocre to frustrating with it. I've exhuasted my knowledge and I cant seem to figure out where my issue is.

I am running an R720xd LFF
2x E5-2660
128GB ECC (8x16GB)
PERC H310 Mini (Non-RAID mode)
Mix of 2TB & 3TB Drives (25TB)

Samsung 850 Evo 250GB SSD cache drive.

Overall This thing is great, it just seems way slower than I feel it should be. Switching between tabs takes a while. Trying to update dockers can take up to 20 minutes sometimes for it to finish. Loading the plugins page takes 2-3 minutes every time I try to access it.

 

Writing and reading data from the array seems to be unaffected. I can copy to and from at full Gigabit speeds.

 

When it comes to Plex, I see my biggest issues. I can't even transcode one movie. I get errors on my Roku TV saying the server is not powerful enough. I can direct play all day, but I'm a subtitles fan so transcoding is a must. I've moved transcode to /tmp. I've even tried installing plex on an SAS SSD mounted through unassigned drives to see if it made a difference with no success.

CPU speeds seem like it could be the issue. "Tips and Tweaks" shows the intel Pstate driver is installed and set to Performace with Enable Intel Turbo set to yes and BIOS is set to Performance mode OS Controlled. But when I try to transcode more than 2 movies at a time my CPU Core speeds drop from 1.2GHz to 180Mhz. I almost never see it sit at it base clock speed of 2.2GHz and its never hit 3Ghz boost. I'm starting to get frustrated because I know these CPUs should be able to handle about 4 1080p transcodes per CPU and I can only get one 720p transcode that will still sometimes fail.

 

Not sure where to go from here. I've asked on the Plex forums but got no help there. Reddit has helped me find the CPU frequency issue but I'm still lost. 

Screenshot_11.png

unraid-diagnostics-20191003-0615.zip

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I created this script to show CPU frequency, does it show anything different?

#!/bin/bash

numcpu=$(nproc --all)

counter=0
while [ $counter -lt $numcpu ]; do
    let cpu=counter+1
    cpufreq=$(cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu$counter/cpufreq/scaling_cur_freq)
    cpufreq=$(echo "scale = 2; $cpufreq / 1000000" | bc)
    echo "CPU $cpu: $cpufreq GHz"
    let counter=counter+1
done

 

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I'm guessing I need to add this to User scripts?

 

This is the output I get:

 

Script location: /tmp/user.scripts/tmpScripts/CPU Freq/script
Note that closing this window will abort the execution of this script
/tmp/user.scripts/tmpScripts/CPU Freq/script: line 9: bc: command not found
CPU 1: GHz
/tmp/user.scripts/tmpScripts/CPU Freq/script: line 9: bc: command not found
CPU 2: GHz
/tmp/user.scripts/tmpScripts/CPU Freq/script: line 9: bc: command not found
CPU 3: GHz
/tmp/user.scripts/tmpScripts/CPU Freq/script: line 9: bc: command not found
CPU 4: GHz
/tmp/user.scripts/tmpScripts/CPU Freq/script: line 9: bc: command not found
CPU 5: GHz
/tmp/user.scripts/tmpScripts/CPU Freq/script: line 9: bc: command not found
CPU 6: GHz
/tmp/user.scripts/tmpScripts/CPU Freq/script: line 9: bc: command not found
CPU 7: GHz
/tmp/user.scripts/tmpScripts/CPU Freq/script: line 9: bc: command not found
CPU 8: GHz
/tmp/user.scripts/tmpScripts/CPU Freq/script: line 9: bc: command not found
CPU 9: GHz
/tmp/user.scripts/tmpScripts/CPU Freq/script: line 9: bc: command not found
CPU 10: GHz
/tmp/user.scripts/tmpScripts/CPU Freq/script: line 9: bc: command not found
CPU 11: GHz
/tmp/user.scripts/tmpScripts/CPU Freq/script: line 9: bc: command not found
CPU 12: GHz
/tmp/user.scripts/tmpScripts/CPU Freq/script: line 9: bc: command not found
CPU 13: GHz
/tmp/user.scripts/tmpScripts/CPU Freq/script: line 9: bc: command not found
CPU 14: GHz
/tmp/user.scripts/tmpScripts/CPU Freq/script: line 9: bc: command not found
CPU 15: GHz
/tmp/user.scripts/tmpScripts/CPU Freq/script: line 9: bc: command not found
CPU 16: GHz
/tmp/user.scripts/tmpScripts/CPU Freq/script: line 9: bc: command not found
CPU 17: GHz
/tmp/user.scripts/tmpScripts/CPU Freq/script: line 9: bc: command not found
CPU 18: GHz
/tmp/user.scripts/tmpScripts/CPU Freq/script: line 9: bc: command not found
CPU 19: GHz
/tmp/user.scripts/tmpScripts/CPU Freq/script: line 9: bc: command not found
CPU 20: GHz
/tmp/user.scripts/tmpScripts/CPU Freq/script: line 9: bc: command not found
/tmp/user.scripts/tmpScripts/CPU Freq/script: line 9: echo: write error: Broken pipe
CPU 21: GHz
/tmp/user.scripts/tmpScripts/CPU Freq/script: line 9: bc: command not found
CPU 22: GHz
/tmp/user.scripts/tmpScripts/CPU Freq/script: line 9: bc: command not found
CPU 23: GHz
/tmp/user.scripts/tmpScripts/CPU Freq/script: line 9: bc: command not found
CPU 24: GHz
/tmp/user.scripts/tmpScripts/CPU Freq/script: line 9: bc: command not found
CPU 25: GHz
/tmp/user.scripts/tmpScripts/CPU Freq/script: line 9: bc: command not found
CPU 26: GHz
/tmp/user.scripts/tmpScripts/CPU Freq/script: line 9: bc: command not found
CPU 27: GHz
/tmp/user.scripts/tmpScripts/CPU Freq/script: line 9: bc: command not found
CPU 28: GHz
/tmp/user.scripts/tmpScripts/CPU Freq/script: line 9: bc: command not found
CPU 29: GHz
/tmp/user.scripts/tmpScripts/CPU Freq/script: line 9: bc: command not found
CPU 30: GHz
/tmp/user.scripts/tmpScripts/CPU Freq/script: line 9: bc: command not found
CPU 31: GHz
/tmp/user.scripts/tmpScripts/CPU Freq/script: line 9: bc: command not found
CPU 32: GHz

 

Edited by wonderbread24
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CPU 1: .95 GHz
CPU 2: 2.09 GHz
CPU 3: 1.28 GHz
CPU 4: 2.19 GHz
CPU 5: 1.36 GHz
CPU 6: 2.16 GHz
CPU 7: 1.15 GHz
CPU 8: 2.13 GHz
CPU 9: 1.67 GHz
CPU 10: 1.84 GHz
CPU 11: 1.31 GHz
CPU 12: 1.83 GHz
CPU 13: 1.30 GHz
CPU 14: 2.18 GHz
CPU 15: 1.45 GHz
CPU 16: 2.19 GHz
CPU 17: 1.68 GHz
CPU 18: 2.01 GHz
CPU 19: 1.71 GHz
CPU 20: 1.91 GHz
CPU 21: 1.12 GHz
CPU 22: 2.07 GHz
CPU 23: .96 GHz
CPU 24: 2.07 GHz
CPU 25: .87 GHz
CPU 26: 2.10 GHz
CPU 27: 1.14 GHz
CPU 28: 1.97 GHz
CPU 29: 1.54 GHz
CPU 30: 2.08 GHz
CPU 31: 1.42 GHz
CPU 32: 2.00 GHz

Thats at Idle. Below is with 2 Transcodes.

 

Note that closing this window will abort the execution of this script
CPU 1: 1.33 GHz
CPU 2: 1.57 GHz
CPU 3: 1.86 GHz
CPU 4: 1.92 GHz
CPU 5: .77 GHz
CPU 6: .98 GHz
CPU 7: 1.96 GHz
CPU 8: 1.48 GHz
CPU 9: 1.87 GHz
CPU 10: .72 GHz
CPU 11: 2.05 GHz
CPU 12: .66 GHz
CPU 13: 1.70 GHz
CPU 14: .62 GHz
CPU 15: 1.85 GHz
CPU 16: 1.44 GHz
CPU 17: 1.54 GHz
CPU 18: .59 GHz
CPU 19: .81 GHz
CPU 20: .67 GHz
CPU 21: 1.69 GHz
CPU 22: 1.05 GHz
CPU 23: 1.49 GHz
CPU 24: .96 GHz
CPU 25: 1.76 GHz
CPU 26: 1.17 GHz
CPU 27: 1.88 GHz
CPU 28: 1.24 GHz
CPU 29: 2.06 GHz
CPU 30: 1.49 GHz
CPU 31: 2.01 GHz
CPU 32: .77 GHz

 

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I figured it out! Under the IDRAC for the server, there was a power cap policy set to limit the power usage to 210w. Any load that hit the server would make the server throttle because it hit that load. I changed it to 400w and the CPUs are boosting now.

 

Quote

Note that closing this window will abort the execution of this script
CPU 1: 2.93 GHz
CPU 2: 2.36 GHz
CPU 3: 2.59 GHz
CPU 4: 2.54 GHz
CPU 5: 2.91 GHz
CPU 6: 2.06 GHz
CPU 7: 2.93 GHz
CPU 8: 1.94 GHz
CPU 9: 2.92 GHz
CPU 10: 1.73 GHz
CPU 11: 2.86 GHz
CPU 12: 2.57 GHz
CPU 13: 2.84 GHz
CPU 14: 2.73 GHz
CPU 15: 2.86 GHz
CPU 16: 2.40 GHz
CPU 17: 2.82 GHz
CPU 18: 2.60 GHz
CPU 19: 2.82 GHz
CPU 20: 2.17 GHz
CPU 21: 2.81 GHz
CPU 22: 2.15 GHz
CPU 23: 2.94 GHz
CPU 24: 2.65 GHz
CPU 25: 2.74 GHz
CPU 26: 1.51 GHz
CPU 27: 2.78 GHz
CPU 28: 2.14 GHz
CPU 29: 2.81 GHz
CPU 30: 2.18 GHz
CPU 31: 2.77 GHz
CPU 32: 1.62 GHz

 

 

  • Like 1
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3 hours ago, wonderbread24 said:

I figured it out! Under the IDRAC for the server, there was a power cap policy set to limit the power usage to 210w. Any load that hit the server would make the server throttle because it hit that load. I changed it to 400w and the CPUs are boosting now.

It would be a good idea to do some research on that specific server configuration and see if it was set that way for a reason. It's possible you could run into overheating if that configuration doesn't have the airflow or ducting rated to move that much heat.

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