I’ve noticed that sometimes when a particular VM/ service is having issues, they all seem to hang. For example, I have a VM hosting my DNS (pihole) and another hosting my media server (jellyfin). If Jellyfin crashes for some reason, my internet in the entire house also goes down because it seems DNS is unable to be reached for a minute or so while the Jellyfin VM recovers.
Is this expected, and is there a way to prevent it?
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Your services may run in separate VMs, but there are still some dependencies between them. You need to know, and think about, all the dependencies between your VMs.
For example, they share a common network interface (the one of the host machine). That is a dependency. If one VM is able to clog the network interface (and maybe your crashing one is doing exactly that), then it is clogged for all the other VMs too.
To resolve that dependency, you can either put another network interface card in your host machine and let only the pihole VM use it, or run the pihole on a real physical Pi.
You could also resolve the jellyfin’s own problem. But resolving the dependency might give you a more reliable system.
That’s a good point; My Virtualization server is running on a (fairly beefy) Intel NUC, and it has 2 eth ports on it. One is for management, and the other I plug my VLAN trunk into, which is where all the traffic is going through. I will limit the connection speed of the client that is pulling large video files in hopes the line does not saturate, and long term I’ll try to get a different box where I can separate the VLAN’s onto their own ports instead of gloming them all into one port.
I’d check high I/O wait, specially if your all of the vms are on HDDs.
one of the solution I had for this issue was to have multiple DNS servers. solved it by buying a raspberry pi zero w and running a 2nd small instance of pihole there. I made sure that the piZeroW is plugged on a separate circuit in my home.
Good point. I just checked and streaming something to my TV causes IO delay to spike to like 70%. I’m also wondering if maybe me routing my Jellyfin (and some other things) through NGINX (also hosted on Proxmox) has something to do with it… Maybe I need to allocate more resources to NGINX(?)
The system running Proxmox has a couple Samsung Evo 980s in it, so I don’t think they would be the issue.
lemme know if you need some tshooting remotely, if schedules permit, we can do screenshares
Very nice of you to offer. I made a few changes (routing my problem Jellyfin client directly to the Jellyfin server and cutting out the NGINX hop, as well as limiting the bandwidth of that client incase the line is getting saturated).
I’ll try to report back if there’s any updates.
hey yeah, no stress!
just lemme know if you’d want someone to brainstorm with.
I had this issue when I used kubernetes, sata SSDs cant keep up, not sure what Evo 980 is and what it is rated for but I would suggest shutting down all container IO and do a benchmark using fio.
my current setup is using proxmox, rusts configured in raid5 on a NAS, jellyfin container.
all jf container transcoding and cache is dumped on a wd750 nvme, while all media are store on the NAS (max. BW is 150MBps)
you can monitor the IO using IOstat once you’ve done a benchmark.
How many cores do you have configured for jellyfin?
4 currently with 8GB RAM and no pass through for transcoding (only direct play)
I’d start at figuring out why your jellyfin VM is crashing
Yeah, I’ve been looking into it for some time. It seems to normally be an issue on the client side (Nvidia shield), the playback will stop randomly and then restart, and this may happen a couple times (no one really knows why, it seems). I recently reinstalled that server on a new VM and a new OS (Debian) with nothing else running on it, and the only client to seem to be able to cause the crash is the TV running the Shield. It’s hard to find a good client for Jellyfin on the TV it seems :(
So is the VM crashing or just jellyfin? Sounds like you may be having other network issues.
Why are you running full VMs for something that can be put in a container? Sounds to me (without having any evidence or proof) that you’re running out of memory and you’re swapping and it’s taking forever. That’s what causes the VMs to slow/stop.
I typically prefer VM’s just because I can change the kernel as I please (containers such as LXC will use the host kernel). I know it’s overkill, but I have the storage/ memory to spare. Typically I’m at about 80% (memory) utilization under full load.
