So show me the STATS and the FACTS that back up your comments. I’m sure the Plex developers would be interested in seeing them.
As a developer myself, I can assure you the issues are known. As a result, I wholeheartedly recommend against using the plugin system in FreeNAS 9.x. I used to use it myself and every single last one of them exhibited problems at one time or another.
Most stemmed from the FreeNAS UI layer losing contact with the plugin due to either forgetting the plugin’s IP address (even though it never changed) or from the communication daemon in the jail dying and not being restarted. While restarting the plugin usually fixed this, one would have to often restart the jail since the plugin system had lost contact. It’s worth noting that all the while the plugin system itself was broken, the application running inside the plugin jail continued to operate, most of the time.
Then there’s the absurdly slow update system for plugins. If you watch it progress, you see that it actually ends up created three copies of the plugin during update and it doesn’t always clean up this mess. I had several GB of old versions lying around through various plugin updates that I had to clean up manually once I discovered it.
Lastly there’s the slow propagation to the plugin system. The packages are nearly always updated sooner than the plugins.
I moved all my plugins to standard jails and these issues ceased entirely. The future looks much more promising where FreeNAS is moving to docker for its plugin system which should fix these issues. You can see a preview of it in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzyMAGbp6_g (starting around 22:30). It’s interesting to note that in that video, the FreeNAS developer actually mentioned the 9.x plugin system has shortcomings. They knew full well of the issues in the plugin system which is why they looked at completely obliterating it in favor of docker.
