I’m finding scans are taking a very long time. Sometimes new files appear immediately, but sometimes they take a while. When I do a full library scan e.g. I’m currently creating new temporary libraries to separate my HD and 4K content (merged in my tv library) to make it easier to remove duplicates, it takes literally days to complete.
What’s the best advice for speeding up scans of large libraries? I’ve read various things this morning:
files organised my current way is the best
My way isn’t best, and splitting files into directories with less than 2k folders is best e.g. /movies A-C/movie1 /movies D-F/movie 1 is best
Use Plex-Autoscan script to only update the directory that’s changed - But I thought partial scan did this already?
I’d accepted that my music folder /music/artist/album was slow to scan, but if re-organising that as well as my movies and tv shows will make Plex more responsive, then I’ll move that around as well.
Curated correctly, You won’t ever need a third-party “Autoscan” script.
Unless you’re on Windows, all the movies can exist in one directory, albeit a pain to curate
Separating media by resolution does make the most sense.
PMS has no functional limit regarding how many directories you add to a library section although I would not “micromanage the snot out of it”. If you have 10-20 groupings, all based on storage & curation technique, that’ll be fine to PMS.
The number of directories in total should be checked. The sole purpose of this is for locally mounted media in conjunction with the “Update my library Automatically” detection. The Linux default table size is 8192 directories. It’s easily increased.
Coupling PMS’s “Automatic” with “Partial scan” will always yield the fastest scan results.
I didn’t have automatic ticked (based on more advice elsewhere…) and I’ll research the table size increase, as I’m way past that number - what are the implications of not increasing?
Edit: found your other post after googling table size Linux Tips
scans should not be taking days unless you are starting a completely new plex install and importing them all at the same time.
also, new import of large music library. that can take daaaaays.
best advice?
bare metal, don’t use docker or vm
store plex data on a dedicated ssd (mine is 1tb only for plex data)
enable automatically scan and the partial scan
server on same host as data, any type of non-local content will increase scanning time
remove or uncheck any not needed agents/plugins.
if you are importing content to completely new plex libraries, disable thumbnail/preview generation. You can re-enable it later after all content has been added.
