Hi I am a bit confused and hope to get some clarification.
So I set up a new server during the weekend and moved my plex library. Since I have a big enough SSD on the new server I decided to activate the preview thumbnail generation (*.bif) files during scheduled maintenance.
Now I have roughly 7000 video files (about 1000 Movies and 6’000 TV Show episodes).
I have set the maintenance time for a duration of 7 hours where PMS is regularly not used.
After 2 days of maintenance I decided to check how many index files have been generated and I am wondering if this a reasonable speed?
I run PMS on a skull canyon i7 quadcore nuc, passmark is around 9.5k.
I searched the AppData folder of Plex for *.bif and found 170 files
So basically PMS has created around 70 SD-bif files per 7 hours of maintenance.
Meaning around 10 *.bif per hour. Is that a reasonable speed? Because indexing my whole library will take roughly 2 months or even longer when i extrapolate this speed. Apart from allowing more maintenance can I do anything to speed this up?
The speed of the bif file creation depends heavily on the resolution, bitrate and codec of the source video files.
If you have older series with DIVX in SD only, then it is very fast. If you have 1080p in HEVC then it is very slow.
10 .bifs per hour is actually a very good performance.
Just let it chug along during the maintenance time.
You cannot speed it up except by extending the maintenance time window.
The newest videos are getting their previews first, which suits most users best.
Thank you very much for your fast and detailed explanation. I didn’t knew that the newest videos come first, which mitigates my worries about the .bif generation time a lot!
You can verify this, by taking a look at the mediainfo of one of your latest videos within Plex.
If it says Indexes sd, this item already had the thumbnails generated for it.
I just wanted to add a bit of trivia. I found out the hard way that this can really take a while.
I have a much more meager dual core processor, 4ghz per core, and with 15 tb of media, thumbnail generation took over 6 months. First month was with only 3 hours maintenance window. The rest of the months ran on a 10 hour window, only to get it done.
It surprised me a bit. Also, the thumbnails currently takes up like ~250gb, which is (to me at least) a bit surprising too.
