@mjmayer You seem to expect to have dedicated use of CPU cores. You don’t.
You have purchased a USD$10/month VPS plan that gives you certain resources - including the ability to use up to your allocated amount of RAM, the ability to use up to a set amount of disk space and shared use of a certain number of CPU cores.
That is the practice in the VPS industry. Plans are shared CPU unless they are specifically stated to provide dedicated cores (and expect to pay for that, cores are expensive). Its the same on Vultr, DO, AWS, etc (some of those offer plans stated to be dedicated CPU, we don’t).
It also has to be said it’s not realistic to expect dedicated use of 2-4 cores on a VPS that costs $10/month.
Lets take Vultr as an example. Today they are offering 4 dedicated cores, 16Gb RAM, 240Gb storage and 20Tb network transfer … for USD$120/month.
So if you would like to be able to transcode whenever you want for as long as you want, that would be a good plan for you. Of course, it will cost you $120/month. Your SSD Nodes plan with similar specs (but shared CPU instead of dedicated) costs you $120 per year.
And, just for comparison, their standard 4 core plan (only 8Gb RAM, 100Gb storage, 4Tb network transfer) costs USD$40/month. That’s shared CPU.
This is probably a good time to point out that your SSD Nodes plan offers more RAM than the equivalent Vultr plan, but costs only a quarter of what they charge.
I haven’t done a market survey to find the cheapest/best dedicated CPU plans for people who want to transcode with Plex. Dedicated CPU is not a market we are in (at present). You may be able to find cheaper dedicated core plans - although if they are very cheap, they most likely aren’t really dedicated core. As I said, cores are expensive.
My point is you can’t buy a very cost-effective shared CPU plan and then complain you can’t use all the CPU anytime you want to.
Plex wasn’t designed to run in a VPS environment. If you want to run it on a shared CPU VPS plan, you can’t expect to transcode. Direct play works very well, as @jasanson says. If you need to transcode, buy dedicated CPU.
Daniel.