Both Plex Mac and Plex Media Player for Mac have CPU Usage in QTWebEngineProcess and Sluggish GUI Performance

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I have been having issues for a long time with Plex Media Player and I tried Plex to see if it would help, but it does not. I also tried the latest preview versions of each. When I open Plex or PMP, QTWebEngineProcess uses 50-100% all the time that Plex is open whether it is playing media or not causing my computer fan to run constantly.

When I go to browse albums, the Plex GUI keeps locking for 30 seconds to several minutes.

Does anyone else experience this issue?

Server Version#: 1.18.1
Player Version#: Plex 1.4.0 and PMP 3.0.0.24

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Yes, the same thing happens to me and has been happening for years. There are a couple of threads about it, but no solutions yet (other than I’ve found hiding the app reduces the CPU usage if you’re only listening to music):

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@wingcomm out of interest, do you have an Intel graphics-based Mac?

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@kfb,

I do not, I have 2013 MBP with discrete graphics. But Mac OS will dynamically switch between them based on which is needed.

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I see. I was developing a theory that the Qt web renderer (i.e. QTWebEngineProcess) was struggling with Intel graphics chipsets, since I only experience this on laptops with no discrete GPU. But I think that’s a red herring then. Thanks for checking!

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@pcalves It looks like my old topic related to this issue was locked. Do you think that you you could look at our logs for this issue?

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Any updates on this case?

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I’ve been reporting this for a while.

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Yeah, any updates?

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+1… even to me Plex for Mac has sluggish GUI performance…
On 5K external display especially…

I use a MacBook Pro 16"…

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Yeah, I found that its worse with music that Movies. Anyone else?

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Have you noticed an improvement with the latest (today) version of Plex.app? It seems “calmer” when it is idle.

QtWebEngine is basically the Chrome/Chromium engine, embeddable in other applications. It’s useful technology for a big cross-platform thing like Plex.

I think most of the Plex.app interface is rendered by QtWebEngine, sharing lots of code with Plex Web.

The Web UI can be CPU-hungry in general. The Plex Activity indicator uses a surprising amount of CPU when it is spinning. The busy-spinner indicators on Manage/Libraries do too.

In places where the Plex Web UI uses a lot of CPU in a web browser, it also uses a lot of CPU in Plex.app under QtWebEngineProcess.

I’m surprised at how impactful those spinner animations are. I wonder if it could be improved, and if that would benefit all of the web-based clients.

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Nope. No change here.

Music still sends my CPU through the roof. Video is not affected.

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Since my recent update to MacOS 10.15.5 I have noticed that Plex for Mac has become very sluggish to the extent that I have had stop and restart the app.
Has anybody else noticed this and if so, is there a fix for it
It ok playing videos, it just moving around the GUI and in particular accessing the Dashboards (I have a number of servers which family and close friends access)

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not only the GUI but also the playback on the external screen is extremely choppy…

please Plex Dev solve the issue.
they are month now in this situation.

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Still an issue here as well…

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bump

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