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I hit 50 concurrent devices on my home rack and it did not melt! | DIY Server Room - Talk Freely

I hit 50 concurrent devices on my home rack and it did not melt!

I was just checking my Ubiquiti dashboard this morning and saw 50 devices online at once. That includes all my family's phones, laptops, security cams, and a few IoT gadgets. I built this whole setup in my basement last summer with a used 24 port switch and a repurposed gaming PC for Plex. Honestly I thought my little 1500VA UPS would give up way before now. Has anyone else been surprised by how much their home gear can actually handle?

3 comments

3 Comments

terryh205mo ago

That 24 port switch is probably doing way more than you give it credit for, @iris_davis90. I had a similar moment last year when I realized my little 8 port unmanaged switch was quietly handling my whole house's camera system, a few gaming consoles, and my wife's work laptop without a single hiccup. It kind of made me think about how we expect things to fail at their limits, but most gear is built tougher than we think. I mean, my old router from 2017 still runs my parents' whole smart home with like 30 devices and they've never had a crash, it's weird how these things just keep going.

iris_davis905mo ago

That 24 port switch must be a tank if it's handling all that traffic without breaking a sweat. Did you have to tweak any VLAN settings or QoS rules to keep everything running smoothly, or is it just plug-and-play magic? I'm genuinely curious what the CPU load on that gaming PC looks like when Plex is transcoding for a few streams at the same time.

jennysullivan5mo ago

Plug and play magic" lol, oh man I wish it was that simple. Honestly, most prosumer switches like that need at least basic VLAN setup to keep your main network traffic from choking out your Plex streams. I had to create a separate VLAN for my media server and a guest network for friends streaming from outside. Without that, everything would slow to a crawl when someone was doing a big file transfer while someone else tried to watch a 4K movie. @iris_davis90 you're totally on point asking about CPU load though, my gaming PC hits about 50-60% when Plex transcodes two 1080p streams at once but man, a single 4K transcode can spike it to 80% easy. CPU is an i7-10700K for context.