I just wanted to get your wise insights levelonetech community on 32 core vs 64 core for large media server/VMs/Dockers/security cameras. I plan to upgrade my server with either a epyc Milan 32 or 64 and going to put a quadro 4000 also for plex transcoding. Does unraid scale well enough where I would see enough benefit bumping to 64 cores? I have not ran a system with that many cores in unraid so I have no real world experience. I just know right now my system is constantly strained.
That would entirely depend on how well KVM and Docker scale with CPU cores. Those are the underlying technologies in unraid.
I question what kind of server you’re running if you’re out of CPU capacity. I run a media server, pihole, reverse proxy, torrent box, nextcloud, and game server out of unraid without issue on 8c16t.
If its mainly transcoding then the quadro is going to reduce your CPU usage a lot… but I’m transcoding 4k streams to 1080p on 8 cores without missing a beat… so clearly we have different workloads.
The quadro is very overkill for that however if could be used as an rCUDA pool which is nice. The main concern you will have is saturating your CPU. The quadro could be quite useful if you want to transcode one and done all of your stuff with h264. Space is cheap. Literally. So for most of my library I just got up and online I had my 980 Ti do the transcoding of I stored different copies of stuff that I knew I would need for other devices (Android, TV, PS3). I am currently working on turning the 980 ti into an rCUDA pool for my MATLAB software etc. So the laptop can have the power of a GPU but not need the power of a GPU
Unraid isnt the problem. Docker is. KVM and XEN do well with a lot of cores and virtualizing. However docker and LXC are not suited to scaling well over the cores. They are limited by single threads to process workers and everything. PODMAN is a bit different but I dont think its on unraid. It doesnt have as much limitations and I know red hat put work into its scaling. Ive noticed docker just consistently underperforms podman. IDK I am a fan of containerizing stuff now. If you can muster is Virtualization is the way
Thanks for all the insghts much appreicated. I have ran a windows server for a long time, and just switch to unraid. It is quite a learning curve, but really fun. I dont think I am quite to that skill level, but hopefully soon
I use OPNsense. Its more comlicated and a little more bleeding edge. That said I think pfsense is fantastic. Dont do beta. Wireguard is cool but honestly while I would love to set mine up on my firewall its easier to run it on the pi for me and provides the rate limiting I want without having to throttle the connection. Plus then its as simple as setting a gateway. I talked about it here
