RescindentArchives - VLC, OBS, NVENC and PSUs

If you had wandered into my archive stream at any point in the last few days you would notice how it was starting, freezing, ending and resetting. I apologise for this downtime and subsequent loss of time from a viewer's perspective, but the intention of this post is to provide a hint to anyone that encounters the problem I had experienced.

Why is VLC media player freezing/ crashing and OBS crashing unexpectedly?

There could be any number of reasons, but in my case there were no logs or crash dumps to provide an explanation. After trying several nvidia drivers I trust to be stable I stumbled upon a forum discussing the possibility of their PC’s Power Supply Unit (PSU). Unable to find a software solution to my issue I thought, "what the hell", and dug out a PSU from a server I am repairing. I write this post at 8pm, 7 hours after going live, and neither VLC nor OBS have crashed. No, I did not publish this after writing it... just in case!

Answer: When nothing else works, try changing your Power Supply Unit (PSU)!

RescindentArchives server migration 2019/11/05 to 2019/11/07

Today the RescindentArchives stream was migrated from a Virtual Machine to a physical server. There were a number of reasons that I shall discuss in this post.

Honourable technology mentions before I begin...

• VMWare ESXi, a bare-metal hypervisor I use to test many Virtual Machines
• Nvidia and AMD graphics cards I use for streaming video

Virtual Machines vs Physical Machines

Virtual Machines (VMs) are a fascinating technology that are often paraded as the answer to every system administrator's woes, but there are downsides to using them. VMs, in most configurations, can be backed-up in entirety, moved from one data centre to another and their performance boosted by moving them to more capable hosts. The hosts are the main reason I am hesitant to use VMs for anything performance or time-sensitive- often a customer will have no idea what other VMs are running on the host. These other VMs have their own demands and in some cases I have seen troubled VMs drain enough resources to cripple their kindred.

You may be asking me why I chose to use a Virtual Machine in the first place, a good question! I love experimenting with technology! When I began the journey of setting up RescindentArchives I wanted to try out VMWare ESxi's GPU passthrough and managed, after some troubles, to get my Nvidia Geforce GTX 1050Ti to work inside a Windows 10 VM. The downside of this is the VM is now tied to its host, eliminating most of the benefits of using a VM in the first place.

Development environments

In my time developing software professionally it was drilled into me from day one that Production was not our platform- it was the domain of our users and support team. As Developers it was our role to deliver improvements, observe problems, work out solutions and pass these all onto the support team, who would scrutinise and potentially implement them. I stand by this philosophy, but when you are the only person managing a project like RescindentArchives you become the Developer and support team! So, by designating a new physical server as Production I can now use the VM for extensively testing new versions before they go live.

So what is this mystical new physical server?

I have loved building new machines since I was in my early teens, fortunately one of them was sitting around not doing much. The CPU is still going 10+ years after it was built, seeing me through secondary school and University, since combined with a new motherboard and hard drive. During testing I discovered how far GPU encoding has come- the Radeon R7 250X GPU I tested could not cope with 1080p at 60fps. As a result I swapped the 1050 Ti into the new host and the 250X into the old. This will cause a performance disparity, but I will resolve this when extra parts become available.

The Virtual Machine formerly hosting RescindentArchives runs on my main Virtual Machine host, a server called, "Contrivian", that has served me well for 7 years:

• AMD FX-8350 (8-core, 4.0Ghz)
• 16GB DDR3 RAM 
• Nvidia Geforce GTX 1050 Ti

These are the new RescindentArchives hosts

 

Rescindent (Production)

• Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 (4-core, 2.8Ghz)
• 4GB RAM
• Nvidia Geforce GTX 1050 Ti

I am already seeing much better networking performance with this physical server.

VW10/ Contrivian (Development)

• 3 vCPUs allocated from AMD FX-8350 (8-core, 4.0Ghz)
• 6GB RAM allocated (host max. 16GB DDR3 RAM)
• AMD Radeon R7 250X

The development server will be back in action soon.