Server Version#: 1.41.5.9626 (running on Synology DS418j)
Player Version#: 10.18, 10.21, 10.24, 10.25, 10.30 all tried (running on nVidia Shield TV Pro 2017).
On an nVidia Shield Pro 2017, recent Plex Android TV client builds show moderate to severe browsing slowness when opening movie/show detail pages. Rolling back to 10.18.0 (arm64) restores reasonably responsive browsing. I’m a lifetime Plex Pass subscriber and have attached diagnostics (meminfo, gfxinfo, filtered logs) comparing player version 10.18 to 10.30.
On bad builds (used 10.30, 10.25, 10.24, 10.21), opening a movie detail page shows the title and background quickly, then a long delay (several seconds up to 20–30s) before the play button, cast tiles and additional metadata appear. App boots slower and browsing is laggy. On 10.18.0 the same flows are not perfect but significantly faster; only actor headshots/images consistently load slower. The issue with title/background loading quickly and everything else loading slowly does still happen, but is much less common and less severe.
Phone and Plex Web clients (same server) do not show the same severe delays. Accessing Plex Web from a browser app on the Shield does not have problems, either - the issue is isolated to the Shield native app.
I collected multiple diagnostics comparing a bad build (10.30.x) vs the working 10.18 rollback. The captures include dumpsys meminfo, dumpsys gfxinfo and filtered logcat snippets during the slow navigation. Relevant highlights follow and full text dumps are included below.
Key findings (summary of the dumps):
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Bad build: TOTAL PSS ≈ 490 MB (heavy Native heap + EGL/graphics memory), large GC events and GPU frame spikes up to multiple seconds reported in gfxinfo. This matches the long UI pauses.
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Working build (10.18): TOTAL PSS ≈ 290 MB, much lower graphics/GPU 99th percentile (≈ 12 ms). Significant improvement in jank and memory footprint.
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Filtered logs on bad builds show repeated
requestLayout()warnings, large GC pauses, and anOkHttpClientwarning about leaked analytics connections.
Steps to reproduce:
- Install a recent Plex Android TV build (example: 10.30.6.4191) on an nVidia Shield Pro 2017.
- Open Plex, navigate to a Movies library.
- Open a movie detail page (the ones I used here were “2046”, “Saint-Exupéry”, “About Schmidt”) and observe that the title and background appear quickly but the UI stalls for many seconds before play button, cast tiles and details appear.
Other troubleshooting tried:
- Disabling home screen and library suggestions.
- Clearing cache/data for Plex on Shield.
- Uninstalling/reinstalling Plex on Shield.
- Running Plex Web via browser on Shield (as mentioned above, this does not seem to have the same issue).
- Making sure Shield was not running low on storage (it was less than 50% full).
I’ve attached meminfo and gfxinfo dumps after using both versions 10.30 and 10.18, as well as Plex log samples from both. The two meminfo samples had to be merged into one text file because of the five-file upload limit here. I don’t particularly need support since I figured a lot of this out myself (well, with the help of ChatGPT), but it would be nice to see this issue fixed. For the time being, I’ve disabled updates of Plex on my Shield so that using the native app isn’t completely painful.
meminfo.txt (6.8 KB)
log sample 10.30.txt (28.9 KB)
log sample 10.18.txt (10.2 KB)
gfxinfo 10.30.txt (3.0 KB)
gfxinfo 10.18.txt (3.0 KB)
