Need advice for getting SageTV for docker as fast as possible

[wayner]

My system is up and running and it runs ok but I am wondering what I can do to fine-tune performance.

I have /appdata on the cache drive on my system. The cache drive is an SSD.
I have JVM set to 3GB. (No matter how hard I try I can't even get to 2GB used)
My system has an i5-2500K CPU. (3.7GHz)
My system has 24GB of memory but I may be dropping down to 16GB.
It is not unusual for me to be simultaneously using 4-5 HD-200 or HD-300 extenders.
I use Gemstone as my UI with lots of Fanart.
I have several other dockers installed and running but they rarely do anything that is CPU intensive.

What are the most important factors to improve the speed of my system. I am wondering about the following factors. What is the most important and am I missing anything. Where do I get the biggest bang for my buck?

CPU clock speed
Number of CPU cores.
Multiple Xeon CPUs
Other CPU factors (like L3 cache, etc)
JVM Heap size.
Speed of SSD.
Overall unRAID server memory.
???

[panteragstk]

Is using sage causing your cpu to get to 100% at any given time? If not I'm not really sure an upgrade is necessary.

[wayner]

I don't think my CPU has ever hit 100% but does that still mean my system is optimally configured? Maybe there are other things slowing down the system, like accessing the SSD? And if I had more memory could unRAID cache more things, like all of my Fanart, in memory?

Last night the system was slightly sluggish in that when I hit the SkipFwd button it didn't skip immediately - it took a half second or so. This was noticeably slower than what I am used to -and this is while watching a sporting even so I am constantly riding the SkipFwd and SkipFwdx2 buttons. At the time there were about four clients connected with 2 or 3 active at any one time.

It is not that I am necessarily disappointed with my system performance, I am just wondering how to figure out where the bottleneck is and whether I can get things working a bit faster with some upgrades.

[panteragstk]

My system is in my sig. I have my appdata on my SSD cache drive and when I use the mini client for android TV that is connected to my gigabit network everything is instant. I've never really noticed a slow down at all and I'm not even scratching the surface of what my hardware can do.

Maybe this could be network related? Do you have realtek NIC on your motherboard? That could be a bottleneck, or your switch, router, none of those things.

These are fun issues to track down, but before you spend anything on server hardware try to eliminate other factors first.

[Fuzzy]

You might get more consistent performance by locking the sagetv docker to specific cpu's, and other dockers/vms to others. This way sage will always have plenty of uninterrupted timeslices, and the dedicated CPU cache will always be ready with sagetv related data.

[BobPhoenix]

I have added the following to my SageTV docker to give it access to specific CPU cores (like Fuzzy was suggesting) and to limit how much memory the docker can use. I found that the docker was using a lot more memory than I had allocated to SageTV so I wanted to make sure I didn't choke other processes on unRAID. May have just been a temporary problem but others were posting about problems with other dockers so I limited this in case I was encountering a docker bug. I have SageTV defined at 4G and the docker at 6G. This ensures the docker never takes more than 6G of memory from unRAID and SageTV will never use more than 4G from the docker allowing 2G for system software in the docker to have it's own space. May be overkill but I don't want either to have problems.

--cpuset-cpus="4,5,20,21" --memory="6G"