Why does the video converter take so long?
Design and Skin Customization
There's multiple answers to this question:
1) First of all, you need to turn down the max conversion workers. This should never be MORE than the number of CPUs in your server, and should likely be no more than 1/2 - so if you have 4 cores, set this to "2". If you have more workers than CPUs the workers will start to compete with each other for CPU time.
2) Setting conversion priority to "highest" is only going to get you a tiny bit faster - I'd recommend setting to "high" as the max. The problem here with it set to "highest" is that EACH worker is now going to try an use ALL processors on your server. Again this will lead to contention for CPU resources between your web server, database, the worker, and any other process running on your server. The only reason to ever use "highest" is if you have a LOT of CPUs or are running a dedicated cluster conversion server.
3) Video conversions are slow - period. There's no way to make them super fast - a 100mb input video is going to take quite a while to be converted to an MP4 version and an FLV version (based on your settings) - I would expect at LEAST 10 to 15 minutes, and that would be with very fast CPUs.
4) Conversion speed is heavily dependent on the CPU speed (higher is better), the amount of free Memory (RAM - more is better) and the speed of the underlying disk system (SSD is best). But even with a screaming fast server it's still going to take quite a bit if time to convert a 100mb video.
