[foaadnami]

hi, what do most people use out there

SAMBA or uPNP ?

How many XBMC clients are these servers capable of handling? Can one run 50+ XBMC sharing the same SAMBA or uPNP server ?

Thanks guys,
Peace

[prae5]

Samba, you can't use upnp if you want to use library mode.

50 clients isn't an issue as long as your server cant handle it.

[andy204]

Nfs

[kingoftowns]

Samba, wow 50 clients ha? I have a setup running four clients and it works fine, but 50 I don't know, I have all my videos stored on one RAID 5 array of 8 7200RPM SATA drives not sure if they can serve up video to that many clients simultaneously. I doubt bandwidth would be an issue but the HDD's may not be able to read all those large files fast enough for that many clients.

please let us know what you find, very interested to know just how many clients can be served simultaneously

[jhsrennie]

Samba, wow 50 clients ha? I have a setup running four clients and it works fine, but 50 I don't know, I have all my videos stored on one RAID 5 array of 8 7200RPM SATA drives not sure if they can serve up video to that many clients simultaneously. I doubt bandwidth would be an issue but the HDD's may not be able to read all those large files fast enough for that many clients.

please let us know what you find, very interested to know just how many clients can be served simultaneously

We have several Windows 2003 servers that support 200 clients without showing undue strain. To go much above that requires some attention to the network infrastructure, but is routinely done at large companies.

JR

[rrambo]

Nfs

x2

[dan1son]

I also use NFS. I find it's considerably faster than SMB.

[kingoftowns]

We have several Windows 2003 servers that support 200 clients without showing undue strain. To go much above that requires some attention to the network infrastructure, but is routinely done at large companies.

JR

serving up XBMC clients? I realize its no problem in a business environment but I don't think you are referring to several 03 Servers serving up video to over 200 XBMC clients right?

[AnalogKid]

50 clients would be fine as long as they don't ALL want to play media at the same time, esp if it's HD video content.

Bandwidth of the network would be a problem, but bandwidth of the HD would be stressed too! pulling 50 1080p movies from a single drive could be an issue unless you were using a RAID arrangement for improved transfer rates.

I have 8 clients at home, but there's no way I can support all 8 playing media. 3 or more starts to give me trouble, but that's a network and server limitation, not client, and it's fine for my use case... I'm not offering a hotel media ;-)

[jhsrennie]

serving up XBMC clients? I realize its no problem in a business environment but I don't think you are referring to several 03 Servers serving up video to over 200 XBMC clients right?

We're getting well off topic now :-)

I am referring to business environments, and yes XBMC clients will differ because they'll be continuously streaming one large file rather than multiple small file i/o operations. This actually makes it easier on the server as it doesn't have to manage lots of file open/close operations, however 200 clients streaming at say 1MB/sec (i.e. 3.6GB per hour, which seems about right for 1080p) is going to max out a single GHz link. You'd need to team several NICs together, but this isn't rocket science.

For big file servers we tend to use 8 or 12 SATA disk RAID5 (or 6) arrays on Dell Perc6/i RAID controllers. These arrays are frighteningly fast. The single read streaming speed is so high it's hard to test. 200 different reads would be an interesting test as obviously there's a lot of disk seeking going on, but then the disk read patterns would probably favour the disk caching on the RAID controller. If I can find a spare day it would be interesting to try and test this.

JR

[skrantz71]

I Use 2TB FreeNAS NSF for archive movie/TV and 1TB local disk and 1,5TB Samsung USB disk local for Music and Photos.

My setup is basic from this guide http://lifehacker.com/5475649/set-up-a-f...dia-center.
+ some homemade scripts
+ SyncBack Pro for auto arcive to FreeNAS when Movies/TV are more than 2 month old.

[kingoftowns]

We're getting well off topic now :-)

I am referring to business environments, and yes XBMC clients will differ because they'll be continuously streaming one large file rather than multiple small file i/o operations. This actually makes it easier on the server as it doesn't have to manage lots of file open/close operations, however 200 clients streaming at say 1MB/sec (i.e. 3.6GB per hour, which seems about right for 1080p) is going to max out a single GHz link. You'd need to team several NICs together, but this isn't rocket science.

For big file servers we tend to use 8 or 12 SATA disk RAID5 (or 6) arrays on Dell Perc6/i RAID controllers. These arrays are frighteningly fast. The single read streaming speed is so high it's hard to test. 200 different reads would be an interesting test as obviously there's a lot of disk seeking going on, but then the disk read patterns would probably favour the disk caching on the RAID controller. If I can find a spare day it would be interesting to try and test this.

JR

Right sorry to hijack the thread everyone.

Definitely correct JR. I wasn't even thinking of higher end performance equipment. (duh! *facepalm)

I'm sitting here thinking of my little home media server trying to serve up video to a ton of clients. Haha

Again sorry for the hijack.

[GJones]

I think you would find that serving larger files would have a significant impact on the utility of the cache. Cache is best when serving frequently used small files (smaller than the cache itself). The ideal situation is actually not RAID when multiple clients are requesting large files. Ideally, each client would request a file from a separate physical disk and the file requested would be written sequentially. This would allow each client request to be serviced by a physical disk sequential read without additional seeks and without contention.

RAID works well in a data center environment because most file requests there are very small in comparison to the cache and the concurrent usage is low. Supporting 200 users often means only supporting 5-10 truly concurrent read requests. In a media server, the reads are much longer (recurring for the length of the movie or show, for the most part) and cannot be handled entirely by a caching controller. This increases concurrent requests and shows weaknesses in RAID. There is a reason unRAID has so many fans for media environments.


Just for the record, I have absolutely no financial interest whatsoever in Lime Technology or unRAID.

[Bahndit]

I use unRAID running on a 2.8ghz Core2Duo with 2GB of RAM. I currently have 6x 1.5TB Seagate 7200 RPM drives. I have been really happy with my setup and I love the ease and relative low cost of expanding my array that unRAID makes possible.

When I was building some XBMC setups for some friends a couple of months ago I tried to see how many concurrent 1080p streams my server could handle. I used an uncompressed bluray rip that I made of Cars as my test file. I ran out of clients to add to the test at 15 XBMC clients. I didn't know/have a way to test out network saturation on my $30 DLink gigabit switches but my server seemed to handle those 15 streams with ease

-Bahndit

[wiggy]

I use an unRaid tower built from old pc parts:

• Old case with 300watt psw
  
• Old mother board with only 2 sata! (but it does have pci express to expand)
  
• 1.6 processor from ebay £10
  
• 2 x 1t hard drives (one for paraty) giving me only 1t of space but backed up
  
• Running headless in the utility room
  

I have 4 clients:

• Laptop - xp
  
• Laptop - vista
  
• Pc - windows 7
  
• Acer revo - xbmc live
  

All work/stream with no problems, unRaid is very reliable and easily expanded just plug in and add it to your array job done!