How Many Users Could This Handle?

[orbit._]

I have a NAS with 8GB of DDR3 RAM, an E7500, 2 Hard Drives (1x1TB and 1x500GB.) The NAS holds video files and primarily uses SMB for streaming (either 720p or 1080p x265). How many users do you reckon this NAS would be able to handle simultaneously? I have done a quick test but I don't have many devices to try. Any insight would be greatly appreciated, many thanks

[Crunchy Dragon]

Probably at least two at once.

 

Your CPU will be the main part slowing down how many users you can have, since I'm assuming you're encoding on it.

Plus the E7500 was never really a terribly good CPU.

[Ashleyyyy]

what harddrives are they exactly? 

[Ashleyyyy]

1 minute ago, Crunchy Dragon said:

Probably at least two at once.

 

Your CPU will be the main part slowing down how many users you can have, since I'm assuming you're encoding on it.

Plus the E7500 was never really a terribly good CPU.

OP said smb would be used for streaming, so the cpu won't have to handle encoding. 

 

EDIT: as far as i know anyway. 

[Ashleyyyy]

@Crunchy Dragon basically all it's doing is sending files to a device that then plays them. smb is the same protocol you use when you just want to transfer files between systems. 

[Crunchy Dragon]

3 minutes ago, firelighter487 said:

@Crunchy Dragon basically all it's doing is sending files to a device that then plays them. smb is the same protocol you use when you just want to transfer files between systems. 

Got it, missed that detail...

[orbit._]

They are some random 5400rpm drives I believe. I'm not doing any encoding/transcoding, the most I am doing is running SMB and nginx to serve files, with SMB being the primary protocol.

[mariushm]

It will depend on the bitrate of the videos, the length of individual files and I guess also on how much it can be cached in those 8 GB of memory. Oh, and how fragmented the files are (if the hard drives have to seek chunks of data, that kills their sequential read speed)

 

Depends on what servers the files ... A 720p hevc video is probably under 2 mbps, so that's around 15 MB per minute, the OS can read in a nice burst of 50-100 MB and then the hard drive can be free to read other files for a few minutes...  but smb doesn't do anything special or smart about caching files. It just serves files.

 

The processor speed won't matter much - for example you can use that cpu to create a streaming radio server and have 1000+ listeners (1000 connections at 96-160 kbps), concurrent connections and all that aren't a problem.

Your problem is disk seek times and all that... the more different unique files are being requested the more the hard drive will have to constantly stop sequential reading a file in order to move its heads to another location to read another chunk of a file ... on mechanical hard drives, each such move of heads can take 4ms or more...

The generic SMB driver or whatever the NAS uses isn't smart enough to read big chunks of files in advance and keep them in memory, or rearrange requests from various clients in order to make the drives seek less, it would most likely rely only on the default operating system's file caching mechanism.

[orbit._]

Damn, thankyou. The partitions are Ext4 (all of them) but I could maybe change if I wanted to. Would I be better suited to something such as XFS? Would there be a better universal/global protocol I could use other than SMB? Many thanks to everybody