An FYI followup for this…
Changed from 5110 processors (2 cores each) to e5310 processors (4 cores each) and not really any change. FFMPEG seems to only use a single core at a time when it is encoding the RDP video to put it out over the html server. I see a single core running at 100%, after a small amount of time it will switch to another core.
The best I can do with this server is x54xx processors which are still only 4 cores each and no hyper threading, just a faster clock speed. This is built on a SuperMicro X7DB3 board from 2007.
I have an old H8 dual processor board that was in service for a slightly shorter time period, but it was having some issues which is why it didn’t get turned into a FreeNAS system. I’ll have to try and sort out those issues and see if I can force it back into service since it might be a little faster, or at least I could buy a pair of processors that should be faster.
Other thing I asked on the mailing list is if Guac can work with a video card to leverage some of the encoding duties, not sure if that is possible but I could stuff an nVidia card into the existing server if it will try to use it.
For text based stuff, Guac seems to be working fine, but for video forget it it unless you have a more powerful server to use.
And all that said, I still don’t have this open to the internet, waiting for the campus IT department to decide if they will forward a couple more ports to my firewall. If not I may need do some underhanded trickery like maybe a reverse proxy to combine some of the other destinations into one port connection. or I’ll just tell my department that it can’t even be tested because they won’t allow access… Less work for me.
So for now I go in through my VPN, then hit the web service to test and video performance is poor. If I RDP directly to that same host, video performance is good enough that they should be able to edit video projects. That leads me to believe that Guac and FFMPEG on this server are the issues.