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?
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.
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.
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 :(
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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.
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.
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.