Weekend Project: Media Server with Plex and Arr apps

I've had a few 2tb SSD's for a while just sitting in my basement, and never had a use for them until now. After finally being fed up with paying over $60 a month for all the big streaming services, and still not being able to find the actual movie I want on them, I decided it was time to make use of those SSDs.

I knew a bit about plex and decided to do some research on how to get this thing working. I learned there's docker images for almost all the apps I would need, so it should be just as simple as starting a container with those and plugging in some credentials, right? But as always, there were problems.

My project architecture looks like this:

Server Side

Plex Media Server: streams content, handles encoding

Radarr: finds movies

Sonarr: finds tv shows

Overseerr: starts search from radarr or sonarr

Indexer: allows for quicker and higher quality useNet lookups

Prowlarr: manages multiple indexers

NZBGet: reaches out to useNet provider

useNet provider: communicates with useNet servers and returns content

Client Side

Plex app: allows you to watch content

Overseerr web interface: use cloudflared tunnel to safely expose local host to queue downloads

It took a few hours to figure out how everything came together, but you just gotta learn it once. Now to discuss the problems I faced with all of this:

#1 WSL Issues:

I repurposed my gaming computer for this, since I don't really play anything anymore. I was using windows 11 for the OS. Docker on windows uses the windows subsystem for linux, which apparently is not great at resource management. I was seeing my 7800X3d peak around 100% on certain cores, and my 32gb of ddr5 was seeing around 90% usage. This was absurd. I learned that you need put some restraints on WSL by creating a config file that set upper bounds on how much resource it was allowed to use.

#2 More WSL Issues:

Ok great i fixed the resource issue, but now I cant seem to get remote access to work on my plex media server container in wsl. Oh what's that, the plex image compatibility with wsl is hot garbage? Makes sense. I took it out of docker and just installed the native windows app and we were all good. I trusted the developers here and the interactions it has with my network, so no big deal but it would have been nice to get everything in the same container.

#3 Usenet download speeds: Ok this was a funny one. NZBget displays download speed in megaBYTES per second. I unfortunately didn't realize this and spent hours trying to figure out why i was only seeing 50 megaBITS per second on my gigabit connection, but in reality i was getting over 500megaBITS per second. I've been seeing that users are able to fully saturate their gigabit networks though, so I'm still tinkering and trying to get faster, but overall happy for now.

#4 more random things I've forgotten since setting everything up

I'll spend some time (and money) in the future upgrading this server. I want to switch off of windows to something like unraid or linux, and also throw some high capacity redundant storage in it.