I've been using Jellyfin for about a year. I've experienced many sudden issues with speed or connectivity, but they usually self-resolve over the course of a few days (I'd love to hear what that's about).
Since the last major update, I've had intermittent speed issues. My network is a bit weird, but it's what I have to go with for a while so bear with me...everything is wired cat7a as direct to the router as possible and broadcast exclusively through TailScale. My server (Win10) and another PC (Win11) are the combined shared storage, so I'm assuming one of the main points of failure between these 2 machines are to blame. In other words, the Win11 PC is acting as a shared network folder (where 2/3rd of my media is stored) AND a client (very inefficient I know, but it's worked up until recently).
Today, I tried listening to a lossless song and it was taking about a minute to load 1 second of music. I've never had speeds that slow before.
The server's hardware: -Intel i7-9700k @ 3.60GHz -RAM 16GB -NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti
Transcode settings enabled: -Hardware acceleration: Nvidia NVENC -H246 -MPEG2 -VC1 -VP8 -Enhanced NVDEC decoder -Hardware encoding
Task Manager for the server shows 95% (~10 Mbps) network usage to be to TailScale and Jellyfin. Network usage for the client is almost 0 Mbps. Memory usage for both machines is below 30%. CPU is less than 10% on both machines. Disk usage is even lower, 0% on both machines. The media in question is stored on HDD on the client-side machine (disk rated for >100MB/s read and write).
Without buying a new drive, NAS, or extra hardware, do you have any tips for troubleshooting my network to see if it's something I can fix? Did I mess any settings up?
Don't know if it's relevant, but I have a Pi-hole and both machines have Simplewall.
Your hardware is more than capable. I'm running on a ten year old dell optiplex and don't have these issues. I suspect your issue is Windows, more specifically something else on windows, such as antivirus, updates etc. blocking disk I/O
I've disabled the native antivirus and Simplewall supposedly blocks most (if not all) of the Microsoft bloat
I'm sorry to say but it's Windows. You never really know. Have you considered getting an old optiplex on Amazon Renewed and putting Debian and Jellyfin on that?
Update for the people downvoting:
I am a professional platform engineer. By 'Windows. You never really know' I mean that there are always ten thousand things running, you're never going to have a full grasp of everything that's happening in the way that you could with a stripped down linux environment. My own Jellyfin instance is running on
All clients connect via Wifi although server is cat5 to switch. Most of my video does not require transcoding. There are plenty of FLAC audio files in my library. I don't see slowdowns as described here.