I’m experimenting with Emby and I am pretty disappointed by the slow media loading times (45 secs-1min) before a movie starts playing. I believe the problem is the fact that I’ve setup Emby on my Synology DS415+ server, which is only equipped with HDDs and when Emby is running, the server’s RAM utilization reaches up to 80%. The network throughput is just fine (Ethernet Cat 6 throughout) and when I’m streaming movies through Kodi on Vero4K or Infuse on Apple TVs, the movies start playing immediately.
If my assumption is correct that the bottleneck are the spinners or RAM of my Synology, is there any chance that Vero 4K is capable of performing duties as an Emby server? What do you think, is it powerful enough?
Looking at the spec of the Synology, it has 2 GB of DDR3 RAM and an Intel Atom C2538 processor.
You don’t mention how the disks are configured or what the Emby client is, but if it’s not having to transcode a video stream, I’d expect it to perform reasonably well, given its specification. I can’t see a Vero4K+ performing better.
My Synology setup is pretty basic; 4x2TB WD Green HDDs 5400rpms configured in a single volume with SHR (which basically is Synology’s equivalent to a basic RAID5).
The Emby client I tried, was actually through Infuse which just introduced support for Emby. Accessing the movies stored on my Synology through Infuse on my Apple TVs directly (no Emby server implementation) works just fine. Accessing the movies through the Vero4K on OSMC/Kodi, also works fine. Setting up an Emby server on my Synology and having the clients accessing anything through the Emby server, introduces a 45sec-1min delay prior to a movie starting.
Oh darn, I was really hoping that Vero 4K would be able to do better since the Emby DB would be stored in Vero’s eMMC storage would be faster that the 5400rpm HDDs.
I don’t have any personal experience of Synology SHR but I’d expect your 4 x 2 TB disks to give very good read performance by spreading the data across all 4 drives. Even a single 5400 rpm disk is likely to provide sufficient read performance to stream most videos, so four in parallel won’t even break into a sweat.
Your Emby server should perform well enough, so if it’s not you should be focusing on why the Synology is underperforming. Have you been on the Emby forum?
It looks like I’m going to have to perform additional tests to determine the bottleneck; thanks for your input.
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