Hi there,
I’ve finally finished ripping all my DVDs, and I’m moving onto my BluRays / HD-DVDs (yes, really) soon.
All of the DVDs are in a single folder, and Plex has found them and catalogued them correctly. Now it’s done that, I’d like to tell it not to worry about keeping that folder up to date, as it’s never going to change again.
Library scans are painfully slow, and being able to tell it to skip 2,000ish movies would be most useful.
Using a .plexignore file removes the movies from the database, so that’s no use.
@Grim… said:
Library scans are painfully slow, and being able to tell it to skip 2,000ish movies would be most useful.
Library Refreshes are slow. But you practically never need to refresh a whole library’s worth of media.
Library updates are not slow - particularly if media files are organised the right way.
Avoid over thousand files in one single folder
Don’t let other software (SubZero and/or other media ‘catalogs’ & players) rummage around in your media folders, thereby changing the ‘changed at’ time stamp of your files and folder. Plex will jump quickly over folders which were not changed since the last library update. But if other software changes anything in there, a time-consuming full scan will take place.
if you have more subfolders, necessary full scans are limited to the small subfolder which was actually changed. So if you switch to the model ‘one movie - one subfolder’, scans are faster. This approach has also advantages if you use external subtitles and local extras as explained in this post.
@OttoKerner said:
Library Refreshes are slow. But you practically never need to refresh a whole library’s worth of media.
Ah yes, apologies. It’s updating, not refreshing.
@OttoKerner said:
Library updates are not slow - particularly if media files are organised the right way.
Sorry, but that’s simply not true in my case. They might be fast considering the amount of work they’re doing, but throw enough files at any operation and it will be slow, no matter how optimised it is. The update of my TV shows, for example, has been running for over an hour, and they are organised into separate folders per season per show.
I suspect the problem comes from having the files on a NAS drive - if I understand correctly the “folder last changed” information isn’t available when you do that. In an ideal world I’d be running Plex on a stonking great dedicated server with twenty-disk RAID array, but I’m stuck with what I’ve got. I should note that Plex is running on a Windows PC, not the NAS itself.
What I am starting to understand, sadly, is that there’s no way to manually tell Plex to skip a folder
@Grim… said:
I suspect the problem comes from having the files on a NAS drive - if I understand correctly the “folder last changed” information isn’t available when you do that.
That depends.
Does the NAS run 24/7 or do you switch it off regularly? If the latter, has the NAS device a battery-buffered real time clock?
Where do you run your Plex server on? If not Windows, which network protocol is used to connect the NAS? SMB/CIFS, AFP or NFS?
Regardless of the answers to the above questions, with non-local storage you must turn this checkbox off:
Settings - Server - Library - ‘Empty trash automatically after every scan’
@OttoKerner said:
Library Refreshes are slow. But you practically never need to refresh a whole library’s worth of media.
Ah yes, apologies. It’s updating, not refreshing.
@OttoKerner said:
Library updates are not slow - particularly if media files are organised the right way.
Sorry, but that’s simply not true in my case. They might be fast considering the amount of work they’re doing, but throw enough files at any operation and it will be slow, no matter how optimised it is. The update of my TV shows, for example, has been running for over an hour, and they are organised into separate folders per season per show.
I suspect the problem comes from having the files on a NAS drive - if I understand correctly the “folder last changed” information isn’t available when you do that. In an ideal world I’d be running Plex on a stonking great dedicated server with twenty-disk RAID array, but I’m stuck with what I’ve got. I should note that Plex is running on a Windows PC, not the NAS itself.
What I am starting to understand, sadly, is that there’s no way to manually tell Plex to skip a folder
[edit] Added a little more information
You clearly have something else going wrong, I have just under 41,000 TV eps on a NAS drive and an update takes 31 seconds. 2300 movies, all organised into individual sub dirs takes 6 seconds.
I don’t consider my setup to be an odd one, but here it comes:
I’ve got a D-link ShareCenter NAS with 4x3TB drives in. The drives are mapped to a pretty high-spec Windows box as Network Drives (W, X, Y and Z if you’re interested). W, Y and Z hold TV shows, and X holds movies.
X is organised as so: X |_ 2012 |_ Loads of movie files |_ 2013 |_ Loads of movie files |_ 2014 |_ Etc etc
The others are organised as in this example: W |_ tv |_ Buffy the Vampire Slayer |_ Season 01 |_ video files |_ Season 02 |_ video files (etc) |_ Crazy Ex-Girlfriend |_ Season 01 |_ video files |_ Season 02 |_ video files (etc)
Plex is told to scan X:\ for movies, and W: v, Y: v and Z: v for tv shows. I don’t use it for photos or anything.
The library is set to update every six hours.
As for other things that might be messing with the files, I’m running CouchPotato, Sabnzbd, Sonarr and PlexPy. Handbrake was also dropping movie files into a folder but not now I’ve finished ripping all my DVDs. My AV stuff is told to ignore the NAS folders (I think, I’ll check).
@OttoKerner said:
That depends.
Does the NAS run 24/7 or do you switch it off regularly? If the latter, has the NAS device a battery-buffered real time clock?
It’s on 24/7.
@OttoKerner said:
Regardless of the answers to the above questions, with non-local storage you must turn this checkbox off:
Settings - Server - Library - ‘Empty trash automatically after every scan’
Aha - well that was on. I’ve turned it off now. I’ll give Plex a restart (and then, grudgingly, I’d better get some work done), but I’ll see how it goes after that.
You want to tell plex to scan a real folder, not the root folder of a drive. Usually, the ‘changed’ time stamps are only available for folders when the network share is provided by SAMBA (which I bet is the case in your NAS.)
So try adding either X:\2012 & X:\2013 & X:\2014, … etc pp to your movie library, instead of just X:
or
move your movies one level down to X:\movies\2012X:\movies\2013X:\movies\2014 etc pp.
and then add X:\movies to your library
I turned off ‘Empty trash automatically after every scan’ and gave it another shot - the movies seemed to go much faster, but the TV shows are still chugging away (it’s been about ten minutes now). The “less files per folder” thing seems to be working backward, as the TV shows are nicely tucked away into subfolders, but the movies are big jumbly mess, but they’re going quite fast now.
