Server Version#: 1.26.0.5715
Player Version#: 4.79.4
Been having this issue recently where media scanning is incredibly slow. During this time it will typically process 1-2 folders a minute and sometimes get stuck for 5-10mins. I see no warnings or timeouts in verbose or debug logs. But this makes scans take 2-3 days since there are over 24k folders and 70k individual episodes in my library.
In an effort to speed up scanning these library options are all disabled/set to never:
Generate video preview thumbnails
Generate intro video markers
Generate chapter thumbnails
Analyze audio tracks for loudness
Analyze audio tracks for sonic features
Perform extensive media analysis during maintenance is also disabled.
Server is an i9-10900, 32GB RAM, NVME SSD for cache/temp dir.
Mixture of media locations, some is local direct disk access (7200RPM Mechanical HDD), SMB target (Synology), SMB Target (Windows Server 2019).
Don’t have access to get logs atm.
New media is quickly found with partial scan, but due to the size of the library I’m frequently moving large amounts of data between different locations within the library (Hot, Warm, Cold storage locations). So typically on full scans 95% of media is skipped and the other 5% or so merely gets it’s location updated.
Empty trash automatically after every scan - is disabled
The main problem is that the 95% that is skipped due to “no changes” takes for ever to actually process. Typically 1-2 folders a minute, average 10-15 episodes/files per folder. Library make up is probably 70% seasons (1 season per folder) and 30% bulk episodes (airing episodes dumped in a communal folder).
Thanks for the reply. I’ve tried larger dumping/temp folders before but historically Plex would just flat out stop scanning for new content once there was 5,000 items or more in the folder. So I’ve ended up trying to separate out full seasons from individual episodes. There is currently 16 source folders for the TV Show library.
Renaming/Re-Organizing 150TB +/- of content as you’ve outlined isn’t feasible, and would be detrimental to the other applications that access this data without issue. I wonder if I would be better off leveraging a 3rd party scanner that doesn’t require such stringent folder hierarchy to be performant? The files are already matched correctly, which is typically the difficult part. I just need to scan and update the paths for the already scanned files. Plex has came a long way over the last 10 years with their matching, I used to have to spend days manually matching, merging, splitting when recreating large libraries. I tried having multiple smaller libraries but ran into issues when searching for content in plex web/apps etc. It’s just simpler from a consumption/end player perspective to have all TV Content in the same library.
I dont follow the exact structure plex wants, but I have <show> {tvdb-<id>}\<show> - <S00>x<E00> - <title> split across 10 folders. and a library scan only takes 20-30 minutes, with ~100,000 files. Biggest issue you need to follow is to have per show directories and avoid intermediate directories. IE point your plex library to N:\Plex\Television\NEW and have N:\Plex\Television\NEW\Shark Tank {tvdb-100981}\Shark Tank S13E14.mkv
Don’t expect external assets and subtitles to work with such a folder structure.
It’s simply un-supported. It may work. It may not. It may work for a while – until it doesn’t.
I’ll just live with it for now, I’m not in a position to rename and reorganize these files as there are other applications accessing this data under it’s existing structure. Keeping those applications working is more critical to me than plex scanning.
