Is plex player secretly mining, high gpu usage while idle on Mac

Plex Players Desktop Players
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Opening Plex app causes GPU usage at 50% at all times and goes up when playing video.

mojave 10.14.2 w/ rx 580

Server Version#: 1.15.2.793
Player Version#: 3.83.1

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Ever think Plex might be performing background chapter thumbnail image generation ?

Rather than making wild, alarmist, and highly speculative assertions, please verify DEBUG logging is enabled (VERBOSE is OFF).

Next Restart Plex. Let it run for 5 minutes.
When CPU loading is visible at the 50% mark as claimed

Settings - Server - Troubleshooting - Download Logs.

Attach the ZIP file

We will see exactly what it’s doing.

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Strangly enough it stopped doing it as soon as I made this post. Im privacy freak and so as you can imagine its very alarming too me.

I’ve noticed this behavior for several weeks now and restarted player, rebooted machine and it was very consistent at doing its thing right away, and now it doesn’t. I will keep watching it though.

Its happening on a client machine, not server, why should I be looking at server logs? Is server utilizing clients for thumbnail generation?

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If your that paranoid you can install pihole along with a real router like pfsense to watch your traffic.

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lol, already have that, for me its not about paranoia but more about power saving and keeping my room cool. summer is coming.

Its been very stable, ran it for several hours. Going to post back in a week or as soon as it comes back again.

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It started doing it now, player been sitting open all day and then server started to record scheduled tv show.

  • status page shows bandwidth usage at 13-31kbps, and no one is connected to the server, well except me
  • router does not show any external connections to the plex server
  • GPU history shows utilization at around 70%, closing player and drops to 0%
  • nothing is playing
  • have no plugins installed
  • server runs in docker: linuxserver/plex

It can’t be using 70% gpu to show status animation icon, any ideas?

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I have noticed similar high cpu usage on the OSX Plex Player client as well. It does seem to be associated with the reporting aspects of what is going on in the server. If some other client is using the server the cpu will spike in the OSX client, even if it is sitting idle. It seems to be associated to the OSX client updating the server status, but I have not had a chance to do further troubleshooting.

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Look like an excessive use for showing a simple status, its not even giving much info that worth all that gpu utilization.

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