Poor Performance

[SolihullRog]

I have used Mezzmo for many years, but I always seem to be chasing its performance.

As my media library grows so does my disc space, and the whole of my PC data gets reorganised.

I go through periods when performance is great, and periods when it isn't. Current performance is very poor and I'm looking to solve it.

My media library has grown to about 2.75 TB, and my largest drive is 3TB. I have various external drives and Windows is on an SSD with about 100GB of unused space.

I stream to my Sony Bravia TV via wifi. No transcoding that I know of.

After a period of adding lots more media, performance is currently very poor. All videos struggle to run.

I understand lots about IT, but little about Mezzmo, video file formats, and transcoding.

But, because I go through periods of good performance, I guess that my CPU and memory must be OK.
Similarly, I don't treat my wifi as a constraint.

I get the feeling that Mezzmo must use a lot of 'workspace' and that my poor performance is due to my discs being full. Or perhaps transcoding is the answer?

Could you please advise as follows:

1. I could buy a 6TB drive and transcode everything onto it. How much space does transcoding use, and would this be likely to improve matters?
2. I could buy a 6TB drive and leave a big chunk of it unused.
3. I could ensure that I have lots of unallocated space on my current discs, which Mezzmo could find and use. Would this improve matters? How much spare space, where? Could it be on the same drive as my Mezzmo library?
4. Could the 100GB on my SSD be put to useful purpose?

Thanks for your interest.

[ftanner]

What sort of performance issues are you having? The reason I ask is that the only real performance issues I see are with like maintenance and what-not. My library is considerably larger than yours.

I have two NAS devices, one with 12T utilization and the other with 10T of utilization, plus several USB drives, totaling about 20T utilization. I'm running it on a four year old i7 mini-ITX system with 16GB of RAM and Windows 7 Professional. I am streaming to two Roku Ultras and an nVidia Shield, plus a couple of tablets and/or laptops for the kids.

That said, I don't have to do much, if any, trans-coding, and that's likely what's killing your performance. Trans-coding is a huge performance sink. I'd highly recommend using something like Handbrake to recode things to formats directly supported by your endpoint devices. I do this with MKV videos. I, typically, recode 720p and 1080p to MP4 h.264 and 4k video to MP4 h.265. My devices all support these formats natively.

[SolihullRog]

Thanks for your input.

My issue is simply that all videos stutter very badly at the moment. They aren't watchable.

I've just added perhaps 50 more videos, which has made my main drive nearly full.

Everything was fine before I did that, but this kind of thing seems to happen about once a year as things gradually build up.

Things like the file formats, the network etc are exactly the same as before, when it was running well. No transcoding that I know of.

I believe that my files are in a format which is native to my TV, and I even make them very small (640x480) because performance is the most important to me and I don't notice any degradation in the video. I don't care about HD.

[jbinkley60]

Stuttering is typically not a Mezzmo issue unless you are transcoding and your Mezzmo machine can't keep up the fps rate. You can check for transcoding by clicking on the transcoding tab while a video is playing. Like ftanner, I rip everything to a native format supported by my clients (Kodi) and never transcode. My library is upwards of 80TB with no issues, even when I have 3 or more streams going. You can try disabling transcoding for your Sony TV and see what happens. That can be done in the Mezzmo device tab.

[Peter]

If your main drive on your PC is nearly full then this can impact PC performance and result in problems with memory swap space. Try freeing up some space on your PC main hard drive to see if this helps.

[smitbret]

Thanks for your input.

My issue is simply that all videos stutter very badly at the moment. They aren't watchable.

I've just added perhaps 50 more videos, which has made my main drive nearly full.

Everything was fine before I did that, but this kind of thing seems to happen about once a year as things gradually build up.

Things like the file formats, the network etc are exactly the same as before, when it was running well. No transcoding that I know of.

I believe that my files are in a format which is native to my TV, and I even make them very small (640x480) because performance is the most important to me and I don't notice any degradation in the video. I don't care about HD.

What are the videos? Are they Blu Ray rips that are 40GB or are they digital downloads that are 5GB? 4k, 1080p, 480p? What devices are you using for playback? What CPU do you have in your media server? Is your WiFi on the AC standard?

[ftanner]

Thanks for your input.

My issue is simply that all videos stutter very badly at the moment. They aren't watchable.

I've just added perhaps 50 more videos, which has made my main drive nearly full.

Everything was fine before I did that, but this kind of thing seems to happen about once a year as things gradually build up.

Things like the file formats, the network etc are exactly the same as before, when it was running well. No transcoding that I know of.

I believe that my files are in a format which is native to my TV, and I even make them very small (640x480) because performance is the most important to me and I don't notice any degradation in the video. I don't care about HD.

What Peter said. When hard drives get close to being full, it affects Windows performance over-all, not just video files. There is a certain usage to free threshold it causes issues. Like he recommended, I'd free up some disk space or install a larger drive.