Hi, I'm running a Synology DS218+. It has 2 MB RAM, 2 Cores, Intel Celeron J3355, 2 TB storage, 63% used (651 GB Available), 180 recordings, Ethernet connected and 300+ MB speed to DVR from my Tivo Stream 4K client. On a Sunday It may be recording 6 things at once (4 football games, other stuff). When I try to to watch a recording (like a football game while its still recording) while the DVR is recording 6 things at the same time, its very slow to the point where it becomes unresponsive. Would a RAM upgrade help? Or am I just asking too much of the NAS having Channels DVR record 6 things at once while trying to watch one of those 6 recordings? I should also note that I fast-forward a lot while watching sports. I try to power thru a whole football game in under an hour by fast forwarding thru dead time between plays and commercials.
You could check the Synology's activity monitor to see how much CPU and RAM is being used when things are slow. That will tell you what you need more of.
I was having performance issues with mine about six months ago. Added another 4GB stick of RAM to take it to 6 total and it was noticeably faster. I think it had started to do some swapping which really taxed the disks and slowed everything down. The additional memory cleared it up.
I ordered a 4 GB RAM stick. I will update this with the results I observe.
I bet its disk I/O. Especially if comskip is also running or if you have other applicaitons using the drives at the same time. recording 6 programs while watching a recording at the same time is more than I have ever tried. I do have 8 tuners though, so I could try it some time. But I would expect all that simultaneous drive activity to cause an issue.
Running "top" from the shell would show what is going on in real time. The "wa" number is I/O wait %.
Im not super familiar with the synology. But more ram is always better. But you really need to look at system resources when it's lagging.
If its I/O issues. The ds218 doesn't support a cache drive. Ummm... could always set the 2 drive to raid 0. Striping for theoretically faster i/o. But that opens a whole new can of worms of reliability.
I remember having 2x 10,000 rpm drives on raid 0 on my rig back in day. It was awesome till I lost everything. Oh but my windows and gaming load times. Sweet sweet memories.That was like 15+yrs ago.
Its not RAM, its disk. I started 6 recordings, then tried to watch 2 of them while 6 were recording. The 2 GB RAM never spiked. It rose slowly and never exceeded 48%. Disk utilization rose steadily and touched 100% at times. Lesson learned here is next NAS I buy needs better disk...