Easily Overwhelmed Server

Channels DVR Server Troubleshooting
#1

It seems my server is very easily overwhelmed. If say there are 3-4 streams/recordings happening at once (local or remote), everything fails. The connection from client to the server fails. On the client side, videos won' load, streams fail altogether, recordings never play, even the guide takes longer to load.

My first guess is a struggling hard drive. But it's a less that 1 yr old disc drive and only 86% full.

I don't have lots of $$ so before I go out and buy a new HD I want to make absolutely sure thats the reason. Any suggestions on any other settings on the server I should check first? Also any suggestions on ways I could test my HD to determine if it's reliable or not?

Thank you very much for any help.

#2

You'll need to give info so people here can see, things like the OS of the server, the hardware involved if it's a desktop, etc.

Also, "only" 86% full is usually not a good thing.

2 Likes
#3

Agreed. Also, what model # is the hard drive? Is it CMR or SMR as I believe performance degradation gets worse on SMR drives as the drive fills up due to the architecture of the drive.

An SMR drive is less predictable 一it can write quite quickly onto a clean drive, but if it has too many write tasks queued, or has insufficient idle time to reorganize or discard overwritten data, then write speeds can be significantly lower than 80MB/s.

2 Likes
#4

So sorry I absolutely should have known better!

  • 2011 27" iMac
  • 16GB DDR3
  • 2ng Gen Core i5
  • Ethernet connection
  • 120GB Samsung SSD for the System Drive.
  • 4TB Toshiba 5400 RPM External drive for DVR Model No. HDTB440XK3CA
  • Server Version 2023.06.08.0458

The iMac it self is older yes, but with the SSD it really flies and super fast reboot times, so I dont think the system itself would be holding it up...

#5

Sorry again for not dropping the info. It's on this thread now.

  • 4TB Toshiba 5400 RPM External drive for DVR
  • Model No. HDTB440XK3CA
  • ‎USB 2.0/3.0

To be honest I never heard of CMR or SMR for drive types before...I looked it up. Very interesting... So I looked up my drive and according to this review its possibly an SMR drive - the reviewer mentions:

"During testing, the drive would be locked at 100% busy, with zero throughput for 15-seconds or so at a time. This seems to suggest the drive could be SMR-based."

This seems to make wayyyyy too much sense! lol

#6

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