Cache/PhotoTranscoder Folder Size Sanity Check

Feature Suggestions
41

@anon18523487 one final comment on this as I kinda feel like I’m flogging a dead horse with this topic.

This morning I checked the size, number of files and dups and then immediately forced a refresh of my two libraries. Doing that increased the size by 2 GB, number of files by 4,500 and dups by almost 7,000. I had forced refreshed a few days ago as you may see from the thread above.

I’m done with this thread now unless you want something specific. Its now over to plex to decide if they want to do anything about it. I’ll continue to nuke this weekly as that is the best solution I’ve found so far.

42

Nope… keep them coming! Plex Admins need to stop ignoring this issue and actually fix it. They claim to purge after 30 days, but there is zero evidence of that. I just had to manually clear my folder which had items in it from well over a year ago. I fixed this previously by using SymLinks on mac and pushing that content to an external drive. Well one of the macOS updates might have broke symlinks from library folders and mine was just gone. Figured it out when Plex crashed because i only had 22mb of disk pace left. This is absurd right now, the fact that Plex Admins have ignored this issue for so long.

43

FWIW, I don’t have any trouble with mine deleting files over 30 days old.

I agree that this needs attention. I’m not sure the PhotoTranscoder cache provides value in the current state.

44

TBF… I cheaped out and only did the onboard 128GB SSD for my current build. That being said, all my content is on thunderbolt 3 raid drives, so I did not need anything on the Mac other than macOS and Plex. So this is an uphill battle for me. It could just be my library is WAY too large for Plex’s current file structure on Mac with only 128gb SSD. I’m at 4,000 movies and 12,000 episodes right now. But Plex Devs have not really offered a great solution for this issue regardless.

45

For anyone else going through this on Mac, I finally had to change the permissions on the directory so that Plex doesn’t have access to it:

chmod 000 “/home/plex/plexconfig/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Cache/PhotoTranscoder”

Plex still runs without any issues and although the directly does still get a few files, it overall seems to have stopped the exponential growth of this directory on a constant basis.

This is a great solution as it doesn’t require any scripting or symlinks to be set-up, just as simple as changing the permissions to ‘000’ which ensures the directory does not have read/write permissions.

46

That’s interesting. It makes me want to look at the logs more closely or set up file access monitoring.

I wonder if cache files are accessed repeatedly. You’d expect them to be, or they aren’t useful as cache files.

But we see multiple copies created, so something isn’t right. I wonder if some of the duplicates are accessed repeatedly, but not all.

Or if they’re only used once.
Or if they’re actually never used.

47

Plotted over the last 3 moth. It’s a tad much. (Yellow line is the important one)

Screenshot 2023-09-28 at 21.40.05
Screenshot 2023-09-28 at 21.40.051575×317 51.7 KB

48

Server Version#: 1.32.7.7621
Player Version#: not relevant
os: Ubuntu 20.04.6 LTS

I typically only follow storage usage in my /home paths and just this weekend discovered I am suffering from this same issue to the tune of 577G. I have also posted in the server forums: HELP - Plex Media Server/Cache/PhotoTranscoder is 577G!

My settings are correct, but evidently it has not deleted any entries since 2021.

I am going to try playing with jdupes or fdupes, but really would like a solution from PLEX!!!

49

The sawtooth - it looks like it grows all week, and then too-old files are deleted once per week. That shape makes sense, I think.

50

My cache is typically well over 250GB and it’s chock full of duplicates.

From a design standpoint it makes zero sense to have duplicates in a cache layer to begin with, and also to be generating unique images for every single possible client/resolution instead of having a couple of sizes that are then scaled on the client. When you are generating this many new images (plus possibly purging the cache frequently) there’s practically no reason to even have a cache. It serves no purpose but to waste space. It’s also missing basic controls to prevent it from growing unbounded. Let users set a size limit, at the very least.

I know Plex isn’t abandoned so it is just confusing how this has not been prioritized better. As someone else already said if you think of the cost of this design mistake, there are probably thousands of users with tremendous amounts of storage wasted which does add up to a lot of wasted space and money for your customers. Why do it like this?

By the way I am baffled at people suggesting using ramdisk/tmpfs as some kind of solution – you guys know you can use a quota filesystem or just a partition right? Why would you use precious RAM for this?

51

I highly recommend this Repair utility., it’s amazing. It will sort out your Plex Photo Transcoder Cache

52

That doesn’t address the core of @honkdazzle’s comments. I share the general “why??” nature of his comment.

53

I agree with you, recently I have had numerous problems with crazy Cache size. In the end the only way I found was to Shut down Plex, nuke the Photo Transcoder Cache Folder, Empty Trash, restart my Mac Mini Pro M2. On restart, I ran Chuckpa Repair and all things were totally back to normal. I have now a stable Cache size.

Time will tell if I have to repeat the sequence, as for why it happens and does happen is an issue and needs addressing. An Auto Purge of the said Cache Folder should be added to Scheduled tasks with a selective timing at least in the interim.