Playing computer games, watching videos, budgeting, doesn’t matter. Sometimes, I’ll be using my PC, and no users are connected to Plex, but it’ll suddenly start using 90%+ of my CPU time. Whatever else I was doing immediately goes to ■■■■ unless I kill the Plex Media Server process. Then I have to remember to restart it before I leave the house or want to watch something again.
It’s very annoying that I have to manually toggle the server on and off to switch between using it for Plex and using it for anything else (that I don’t want interrupted at some point by the CPU being taken over). I’ve already tried a couple of solutions based on other issues people have had, like lyrics transcoding and such, but I haven’t had any luck. This wasn’t happening before 2-3 weeks ago.
One thing that already has me starting to regret buying a lifetime pass is that I apparently am not able to open a support ticket. A subscriber-only forum is all the support we get?
Sounds like you have indexes enabled and Plex is creating thumbnails. Ypu can turn them off on a per library if you want by editing the library and going to the “advanced” tab.
This also reinforces my belief that servers should have no other duties. Plex is designed to work and play well with others and it succeeds pretty well at that BUT it uses a LOT of resources at times and that is going to cause problems at least some of the time.
I guess I’m wondering why my entire CPU has to be hijacked to sporadically generate thumbnails, especially when my library doesn’t change very often.
Look at Library and Scheduled Tasks settings in PMS.
In Library for thumbnail generation you can choose never, as scheduled task, or scheduled + when added.
In Scheduled Tasks you can set the window for when tasks run.
Thanks for the tip. That still doesn’t explain why thumbnail preview generation has high CPU usage, though. I guess the real answer is probably “it’s cheaper to allow scheduling than write an algorithm that scales with use of the PC.”
Thumbnail generation uses the transcoder, the same process used when transcoding streaming video.
Given it’s main purpose, transcoding video on the fly, which is CPU intensive, it will use all available resources.
There is no way to restrict the number of cores, etc in use by the transcoder.
Where there’s a will, there’s a way.
Scheduling the preview generation (which I had disabled on all my libraries anyway) didn’t help.
There was an update recently, but PMS is still doing it. I guess this is the part where I regret spending money on a product that has no support contact. God damn it…
Hey ptaoist, did you ever solve this?
At some point during the year since posting this, the problem went away on its own. I imagine some update fixed it. I haven’t had any issues since.
I used to have to make sure to shut down Plex anytime I was playing a PC game, because a pegged CPU meant there was no CPU time for the game to run, leading to freezing, etc.; A massive issue, especially during an online game. I’ve played many hours since without having to shut it down at all.
I am relying on Process Lasso to restrict all Plex processes to 1 or 2 CPU threads, sometimes it still effects games but if I close and restart Plex it is fine.
Just posting my somewhat-solution for others that happen upon this thread
