I have a question related to network traffic, latency, and potentially NIC load balancing as related to my home network, and I'm curious if anyone has any experience here who can voice opinions as to what can help. The situation is this:
I current have a home gigabit network. The parts of it that are pertinent to this question are the following:
One Home Server running Windows 2012 Essentials (i17 930, 14GB RAM).
One Ceton InfiniTV 6E Network based TV tuner
One HTPC (i5 2500K, 6GB RAM)
Each of these are hooked up into a Gigabit Switch. The Home Sever currently has 3 Intel INCs set up in a Team (Adaptive Load Balancing). It is also running Plex Media Server.
I recently added the Ceton tuner and got Digital Cable. All 6 of the tuners are assigned to my HTPC. The HTPC records TV, and runs MCEBuddy to convert the recordings, and then saves the converted files to the Home Server. The HTPC also runs the Plex client.
Ever since adding the cards/tuner/recording to the HTPC, it has gotten extremely slow in loading Plex when I start it up. All other PCs in the house, when you open Plex, almost immediately show the movies, TV shows, etc. On the HTPC however, it takes up to 30 seconds to populate the list now.
My theory is that now, since adding the tuners, it is almost constantly dealing with HD steams from the Ceton; and all those streams go over the network. MCEBuddy also transfers files to the server over the network every time it finishes converting a show. This means where my HTPC used to have limited traffic (watching shows off the server) now it has a constant stream of incoming from the TV tuners as well as occasional outbound copying converted shows to the server.
So my question is: would adding a 2nd NIC to the HTPC and setting up load balancing on it make more effective bandwidth available to reduce the latency Plex is getting from the Server? The switch isn't managed, or smart, so any load balancing has to be done by the computers involved.
My goal here is to get Plex back down to responding instantly as it does on the other computers, regardless of the streams coming in from the TV tuner and whatever file copies might be going on in the background.
Any thoughts?
I current have a home gigabit network. The parts of it that are pertinent to this question are the following:
One Home Server running Windows 2012 Essentials (i17 930, 14GB RAM).
One Ceton InfiniTV 6E Network based TV tuner
One HTPC (i5 2500K, 6GB RAM)
Each of these are hooked up into a Gigabit Switch. The Home Sever currently has 3 Intel INCs set up in a Team (Adaptive Load Balancing). It is also running Plex Media Server.
I recently added the Ceton tuner and got Digital Cable. All 6 of the tuners are assigned to my HTPC. The HTPC records TV, and runs MCEBuddy to convert the recordings, and then saves the converted files to the Home Server. The HTPC also runs the Plex client.
Ever since adding the cards/tuner/recording to the HTPC, it has gotten extremely slow in loading Plex when I start it up. All other PCs in the house, when you open Plex, almost immediately show the movies, TV shows, etc. On the HTPC however, it takes up to 30 seconds to populate the list now.
My theory is that now, since adding the tuners, it is almost constantly dealing with HD steams from the Ceton; and all those streams go over the network. MCEBuddy also transfers files to the server over the network every time it finishes converting a show. This means where my HTPC used to have limited traffic (watching shows off the server) now it has a constant stream of incoming from the TV tuners as well as occasional outbound copying converted shows to the server.
So my question is: would adding a 2nd NIC to the HTPC and setting up load balancing on it make more effective bandwidth available to reduce the latency Plex is getting from the Server? The switch isn't managed, or smart, so any load balancing has to be done by the computers involved.
My goal here is to get Plex back down to responding instantly as it does on the other computers, regardless of the streams coming in from the TV tuner and whatever file copies might be going on in the background.
Any thoughts?
Last edited:
Facebook
Twitter