There may not be an easy answer for this problem with Plex as it stands, but I thought I’d try asking anyway.
So, I have a large music library. How large? It would take me several months to listen to everything. The vast majority of this library is encoded in FLAC with a handful of MP3s.
As I’ve been adding music to my library over the last few weeks, I’ve noticed that it’s been increasingly difficult to pull up the library itself or to edit track/album data. In some cases, I’ll attempt to open the info for an album and be greeted with a blank screen that never manages to populate. Sometimes, closing the browser window and re-opening allows me to edit a few entries before I end up back where I started. And yes, this is with regularly optimizing the database as I add or delete large amounts of music.
Playback via Android and the other platforms I’ve tested works fine. So I know the library and the server itself are working.
I’ve seen some reference made elsewhere to chopping up larger libraries to work around similar performance issues, but that’s not a route I want to take as it would require changing my directory structures for ease in updating those individual libraries. Not enticing stuff. Additionally, I’ve run into issues with artists whom I’ve got a metric ton of albums on file for (I’m looking at you, Buckethead). On the Playstation 4 app, for example, I can’t even scroll through all of my Buckethead albums without crashing the app, so I suspect this issue will crop up again even if I did sub-divide my library.
Anyone have any thoughts on what I can do to help things along, or is this just the new normal until some future update streamlines the library?
My music library is 4 months worth of listening time, so maybe a bit comparable to yours.
My server has 8GB RAM.
The hard disk where the Plex data reside is an internal 7200 rpm affair.
If you are only running Plex on a laptop and have moved the plex data to an external hard disk, you’ll certainly feel the slower speed.
If your library is excessively big, you might want to think about a dedicated internal SSD drive for the Plex data.
(side note: with “Plex Data” I don’t mean the media files themselves)
Make sure you enable the Scheduled Task ‘Optimize database every week’
The server must be running during the scheduled hours for maintenance. Otherwise you’ll have to perform the database optimization manually.
Always use a ‘wired’ network connection for your server.
Disable power saving features on your network adapter.
Avoid having more than 500 items in one folder (whether these items are actual music files or subfolders is irrelevant).
With Plex you definitely want a AlbumArtist / Albumtitle / Tracks folder hierarchy.
Having just a big folder with several thousand files in it, will slow things down considerably.
Thanks for the reply. How heavily is the amount of RAM on my server going to impact performance in terms of browsing?
Of everything you’ve mentioned, this is the red flag jumping out at me as I believe my server is only running 4 GB and is an older machine just to top the whole thing off.
The performance drop was a 0-60 affair where PMS went from operating smoothly to not operating very well at all in terms of library browsing, so I assumed the issue had to be software related (likely incorrectly).
Fortunately, of all the points you raised, the directory structure is already what you’ve recommended, so at least I can remove that from the list of considerations.
@Runicen said:
Thanks for the reply. How heavily is the amount of RAM on my server going to impact performance in terms of browsing?
Of everything you’ve mentioned, this is the red flag jumping out at me as I believe my server is only running 4 GB and is an older machine just to top the whole thing off.
This depends heavily on
how many items are in your plex library
are you using some fancy software RAID or pooling or just plain hard drives
what else is running on the server
what kind of hard disk is running now for the C: drive and how much free space is left on it
The performance drop was a 0-60 affair where PMS went from operating smoothly to not operating very well at all in terms of library browsing, so I assumed the issue had to be software related (likely incorrectly).
Have you performed the database optimization?
This should only take a few minutes at max.
But only do it while Plex is not doing anything else and you have plenty of free space on C:
Side note: If you just upgraded to version 1.10 of the server, it might do now an extensive analysis of all your music files. This adds additional load on your server.
This is to add loudness information. It should be done within a few hours.
Fair to say we’re well into the thousands at this point. I don’t have hard numbers, but I know the last time I looked at my music library on my “daily driver,” it was a number that surprised me.
are you using some fancy software RAID or pooling or just plain hard drives
The server’s OS is on a dedicated C: drive (standard 7200rpm HDD) and the library itself is on a striped RAID array with the array handled by Windows.
what else is running on the server
Nothing beyond normal Windows 7 processes and anti-virus. It’s a dedicated server.
what kind of hard disk is running now for the C: drive and how much free space is left on it
I’ll have to wait until I’m home tonight to answer on free space, but it should have plenty as nothing beyond the OS is installed on that system drive.
Have you performed the database optimization?
I do this regularly when adding large chunks of media to the server. Honestly, probably more often than is necessary.
@Runicen said:
The server’s OS is on a dedicated C: drive (standard 7200rpm HDD) and the library itself is on a striped RAID array with the array handled by Windows.
What influenced the decision to go with a striped set?
I think it requires a fair amount of RAM just for maintaining it. But without a big advantage. I think the striped set is even more fragile than several regular volumes.
You can easily point your library to several discrete hard drives.
And the freed RAM can be used better as drive cache.
Nothing beyond normal Windows 7 processes and anti-virus. It’s a dedicated server.
Make sure to define an exemption in your AV software for the Plex data folder so it doesn’t interfere in there. Microsoft’s default AV for sure slows things down.
What influenced the decision to go with a striped set?
I think it requires a fair amount of RAM just for maintaining it. But without a big advantage. I think the striped set is even more fragile than several regular volumes.
You can easily point your library to several discrete hard drives.
And the freed RAM can be used better as drive cache.
I honestly had no idea RAID was so RAM greedy. How much consumption are we talking for that in broad terms?
As for what influenced it - I had two drives I wanted treated as one and figured I’d get a performance boost in that old machine by striping the drives. Beyond that, I’ll confess there wasn’t much thought behind it and up to this point, it was never a problem. Still, it makes sense that it could be a resource hog with a large library added on top of things.
Make sure to define an exemption in your AV software for the Plex data folder so it doesn’t interfere in there. Microsoft’s default AV for sure slows things down.
I’ll double check this, but I don’t believe my Webroot installation conflicts at all with Plex.
So it’s said, thank you x1000 for the helpful info. I’m starting to suspect I may have hit the ceiling hardware-wise with the tower I’ve been using as my Plex server, but you’re giving me some other avenues to try out before I call the game on it.
@Runicen said:
I’ll double check this, but I don’t believe my Webroot installation conflicts at all with Plex.
I’m not sure what you mean by ‘Webroot’. Is this a type of AntiVirus software?
I was merely telling you that the constant supervision by an AV software takes a toll, speed-wise. And every Antivirus software has the ability to define areas that are exempt from their constant supervision.
@OttoKerner said:
Side note: If you just upgraded to version 1.10 of the server, it might do now an extensive analysis of all your music files. This adds additional load on your server.
This is to add loudness information. It should be done within a few hours.
Why was this not mentioned anywhere in the release for this ?
My computer is almost dead now because i have thousands and thousands of audio files. I can not use the computer if plex is running bec i get 12-15 scanners running… and my cpu is maxed out.
there has to be an option to disable this… otherwise plex is dead for me
it would take weeks for this to scan my entire library
i am rather upset at this major change… did no one think about the users and the possibility of them having large audio libraries and what a change like this would do to affect their systems?
I have used plex for years and years and am a lifetime subscriber and this is the first time that i can not use plex at all due to the change in the software. not a merry christmas in this household.
@Runicen said:
I’ll double check this, but I don’t believe my Webroot installation conflicts at all with Plex.
I’m not sure what you mean by ‘Webroot’. Is this a type of AntiVirus software?
I was merely telling you that the constant supervision by an AV software takes a toll, speed-wise. And every Antivirus software has the ability to define areas that are exempt from their constant supervision.
Sorry for the lack of response - the holidays had me out of commission for a while there.
Yes, Webroot is a relatively low footprint (in my experience) Antivirus application.
Getting back to one of the original questions, I was rudely awakened from whatever dreamland I was living in when I checked both total memory and consumption on my server.
Bearing in mind, this is a tower that shipped with Windows Vista, I shouldn’t be surprised, but it only has 3GB of DDR2 RAM installed. When I logged in to the machine itself and checked its performance monitors, I found that nearly 2GB was in use. Fortunately, DDR2 is reasonably inexpensive, so I ordered enough to max it out at 8GB without shelling out too much cash. That may help things along.
Additionally, in case anyone finds this thread in future, I will say that the recent PMS update also sped things up a bit, so there must have been some behind the scenes optimization taking place there as well.
At this point, I suspect the RAM upgrade will buy me some time with this hardware, but the bottom line I’m running up against is that the hardware I’m using as my server is near to its capacity given the size of the Plex database I’m asking it to run.
