Föderation EN Fr 10.05.2024 22:38:36
Which upgrade will give me more immediate benefit, a Broadwell Xeon with more cores (Maybe go from 2x6 to 2x14?), or another 64GB of RAM?
Föderation EN Fr 10.05.2024 22:40:58
For what purpose?
Föderation EN Fr 10.05.2024 23:03:13
@mos_8502
Higher CPU clock will do the most. Cores will only help if your codec supports a highly parallel encode or if you are doing chunked encoding with many simultaneous encodes.
Chunked encoding will use more RAM as the number of encode processes goes up.
I think it is highly unlikely that the RAM upgrade will be needed nor provide a performance improvement. Unless your current workflow uses all the available RAM for video effects processing it will provide little to no advantage.
The only time I have seen a video encode process use more than 64GB of RAM was a chunked AV1 encode which was badly configured and was running a separate video effects pipeline for each encode process.
Föderation EN Sa 11.05.2024 10:29:23
The lesson I learnt about video encoding is this: If your code runs in a virtual machine, make sure ffmpeg can use the CPU flag AVX2 and similar vector extensions. (Do lscpu or cat /proc/cpuinfo to check!)
Netcup's VPS does not hand down these CPU flags to the VM. Netcup's "Root Server" does.
Föderation EN Fr 10.05.2024 22:55:54
@mos_8502
Depends. Check your resources when you're currently encoding? If you're not really tapping out RAM, not much point adding more for now.
Föderation EN Fr 10.05.2024 23:08:13
@mos_8502 Definitely the CPU. Although I suspect a better GPU and nvidia acceleration is probably the best upgrade for encoding in 2024 . Not sure how well this is supported on Linux nowadays. But for the price the CPUs would definitely make a difference.
Föderation EN Sa 11.05.2024 00:53:58
@mos_8502 more cores usually means less single thread speed, if you are doing single tasks, go higher core clock; after that, probably gpu (for video encoding), then ram
Föderation EN Sa 11.05.2024 01:20:23
@mabs Assuming the base speed of the cores is identical or higher.
Föderation EN Sa 11.05.2024 09:47:59
@mos_8502 if your heaviest CPU workload is video encoding I'd suggest to populate only one socket with a high-core/high-frequency SKU. Anything in the E5 269X V4 line would do, those have high number of cores (16+) and high boost clocks (3.3GHz+). Given video encoding doesn't scale very well populating the second socket will likely reduce per-thread performance (because of the significantly higher memory latencies) and ultimately yield lower performance.
