I transcode to ramdisk.
this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2024
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I have like a dozen people using my Jellyfin and sometimes 3-4 people watch something at the same time which results in a lot of transcoding data. At the moment my transcoding directory (which is cleaned every 24 hours) is almost 8 GB big. I don't have the RAM to do this.
Starting with 10.9 you can enable segment deletion so files are cleaned up while still transcoding.
Im so looking forward to this. When i tried to use tmpfs / ramdisk, the transcoding would simply stop because there was no space left.
Version 10.9 is not even released, right?
Nope, release target is mid-April currently.
How is this done? If you don't mind sharing 🤗
tmpfs is the filesystem you are looking for. You can mount it like any other filesystem in /etc/fstab.
tmpfs /path/to/transcode/dir tmpfs defaults 0 0
Can just point it to /dev/shm as a transcoding folder, for a quick and dirty way.
Otherwise you'd mount a tmpfs disk.
I will have to try that once my ram upgrade gets here.
You can restrict the size of the ramdisk so you do not end up killing processes. A large amount of ram is not mandatory.
Good to know. Well I have 16G now that should give me plenty to spare.
Personally I have a secondary external SSD I use for my cache and transcode directories so that my transcodes aren't throttled by being read from and written to the same disk.
Also of note is that Jellyfin does have a cron job built into it to clear the transcodes directory. You can see it under Dashboard -> Scheduled Tasks -> Clean Transcode Directory. I have mine set to run every 24 hours.
Yeah, but the cleanup job doesn't seem to work reliably. I noticed because my home server ran out of disk space because the transcoding directory was over 30 GB in size.
Why not write to ram instead?
How much RAM would this consume?
that does not matter you can just download more ram
Every transcode could need as much disk space as the size of the file you're playing. If you have a media file that's bigger than your available RAM the transcode will propably cause problems because you will run out of RAM.