• 21 Posts
  • 85 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Modern CPUs (from like the last 20 years) will throttle down a lot before they actually shut down. Unless your cooling is completely inadequate or somehow broken, shutdowns because of high load just dont happen. I suspect there is something fundamentally wrong with your hardware.

    A problem with cooling could also go some way to explaining your performance problems – but it could also just be that your system just doesn’t have the computing power to do what you want it to. The computing demands from video decoding go up dramatically when you go beyond 1080p. If I recall correctly, the Intel Core CPUs with the “U” at the end were the low-energy models (for longer battery life); of course that comes with compromises on the performance side.

    The CPU model suggests that this is a laptop, and a fairly old one at that. I would look for things like blocked air ducts or broken fans if I were you. It’s also possible that the thermal compound between your CPU and the CPU cooler has dried out and needs replacing (although laptops of that power class should be using thermal contact solutions that do not dry out), or that contact has lessened for other reasons. Again, if your computer seriously powers down because of load, it’s borderline broken and in need of maintenance.

    As for your other question, no RAM cannot help with that. It can hurt if you have too little of it, but once you have enough, the best it can do is not be a bottleneck.

    * Edit: Also, make sure you are not setting down the laptop on anything soft, like a blanket, when using it. It will sink in and have its air intakes blocked if you do that.










  • Several years ago now. On at least two of those tries, after maybe a month or some of daily driving, suddenly the fs goes totally unresponsive and because it’s the entire system, could only reboot. FS is corrupted and won’t recover. There is no fsck. There is no recovery. Total data loss.

    Could you narrow it down to just how long ago? BTRFS took a very long time to stabilise, so that could possibly make a difference here. Also, do you remember if you were using any special features, especially RAID, and if RAID, which level?


  • Out of interest, since I’ve not used the “recommended partion setup” for any install for a while now, is ext4 still the default on most distros?

    I recently installed Nobara Linux on an additional drive, because after 20 years, I wanted to give Linux gaming another shot (works a lot better than I had hopes for, btw), and it defaulted to btrfs. I’ll assume so does Fedora, because I cannot imagine Nobara changed that part over the Fedora base for gaming purposes.



  • Dunno about ideal, but it should work.

    It does have quite a bit of overhead, meaning it’s not the fastest out there, but as long as it’s fast enough to serve the media you need, that shouldn’t matter.

    Also, you need to either mount it manually on the command line whenever you need it or be comfortable with leaving your SSH private key in your media server unencrypted. Since you are already concerned with needing to encrypt file share access even in the local network, the latter might not be a good option to you.

    The good part about it is, as long as you can ssh from your media server to your NAS, this should just work with no additional setup needed.