Experience running Emby server natively vs Emby in a docker container

  • I didn't really find information about the issues I encountered online, so I want to share my findings after running Emby both natively and in a docker container. I only really experienced this with OMV, the OMV Extras Docker plugin and the official container, haven't tried it in another host OS or docker install, but that's besides the point. What I found is that the docker install of Emby really struggles to deliver stable performance in some cases. For example while transcoding media, the playback randomly stops, as if the network connection has dropped(it really hasn't). In the server logs it is as if the client device has suddenly disconnected. I am running a more than powerful enough CPU for the task, I'm running the whole thing on an SSD, and tested on the local network to eliminate the doubt of unstable networking, but the problem persisted. Installing the Emby server natively however, eliminated these random stutters. I found it really strange and decided to investigate. After extensive testing, raw performance(transocoding fps, number of simultaneous streams) the difference between native and docker is within the margin of error. Network performance in other docker containers also seems absolutely fine. So yeah, I still don't know what causes this behaviour, but I decided to share this, in case someone else is having trouble with his Emby docker container. For reference I'm running a Supermicro X9SCM-F with a Xeon e3 1240

    • Offizieller Beitrag

    The monstrosity of mono gives a very pwerful reason to use docker. Even if host and container had the same mono version there shouldn’t be any performance penalty. In this case Debian ships mono 3 which is very old that might be the cause.


    Docker is the way to go for any mono app.

  • Nothing of note in the docker container logs? You might need to enable some debug logging.

    No nothing abnormal, I haven't enabled debug or some higher verbosity level logging in docker thou. Might do that in the next couple of days if I have time. Btw I am not really sure but aren't Emby's latest releases running on .Net core rather than Mono ?

  • Emby in a docker won't use hardware accelerated encoding here (Intel Quick Sync). I added the render node to the environment variabes and the video group to the gidlist (in my case 44).
    Is there anything else I can (need to) do to make it work?

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