Does Plex keep a list of maintenance tasks still to do somewhere? If so, where?
I´m running Plex on a QNAP NAS and would like to figure out exactly what still needs to be done.
I am new to Plex. Just installed it, and indexed over 20 TB of movies and TV Series. I knew it was going to be a painfull process of generating thumbs and the like, but it´s been several weeks now and this is still going…
Thanks for any help.
Alex
Several weeks?
Something is wrong. I recently re-indexed my whole server from scratch and it took less than 24 hours for 110TB.
So what’s it actually doing right now?
Have you used the Plex required folder structure and naming?
Actually sorry I missed the QNAP part.
So I can’t really say if it’s abnormal.
Yes, I am using the Plex naming convention, and I have the maintenence window set to 6 hours a day, but not using 100% CPU for this.
The server is generating the thumbs for the movies. It seems, at least to me that the movies are different every time.
At the beginning of the maintenance window it updates a couple of the current shows I have on the TV Series, and then it goes back to creating the thumbnails for the movies.
Today it was at the L’s, yesterday it was at the J´s. I really don´t think it is reindexing everything, I just think it has a lot to do, that is why I want to know if there is an actual task list files that I can look at to see how much more it has to do, and adjust my cpu usage and/or increase the maintenance window to get this done.
Ah right VP Thumbnails.
Yeah I don’t think there is any set pattern to it and they can take a long time.
Do you actually use them? They can be disabled.
Depending on the settings you have they can also be changed to just be created for new media. You still have the option to generate them manually by clicking analyze (for everything else.)
I agree though I would love some fine tuning.
This is a good question. Honestly, I’ve never found them to be worth the trouble involved in creating them.
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On the ATV 4K they are pretty good apart from for HDR content. (not HDR or tonemapped)
On everything else they are garbage. (except the Shield on which they would have to improve a whole lot to be classed as high as garbage.)
The irony being on the ATV 4K Infuse does them on the fly and HDR movies have HDR thumbs.
It doesn´t matter one way or another to me. I think the feature can be useful, for example for my wife when she falls asleep in the middle of a movie and the next day is browsing for where she left of, but not to be rude, we are also getting off-topic, since the question is if there is a list of maintanance tasks to do, and where it is…
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I’m fairly sure @Cafe_Diem didn’t mean to offend. He’s just not that way inclined.
I think though the bottom line is that Plex more or less does what it wants when it wants in that scheduled tasks setting.
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To be fair man, you’re probably better, upon initial run, turning off any CPU limits and getting rid of the window, and letting it index and do its thing, once it’s complete, then enable the cpu limits and the window… But I have no idea what else you may use your server for, so that suggestion could be way off base for you. Plex does a lot in its maintenance window, including building your thumbnails, grabbing metadata, analyzing the files and structure, etc. but once your entire library is done, it only should only have to do this for a few items at a time as you add content, which is a fairly easy load.
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I was assuming (maybe wrongly) he is past that stage. But specifically with the VP thumbs it will do them as it chooses. I may be wrong. But I’m not aware of any logic behind the order it creates them.
well, if they were at J last night, and L tonight, it’s doing them in Alphabetical order it seems, which wouldn’t be uncommon as it likely added the content in alphabetical order to the DB… He did say he just installed it and added a bunch of content to it, and that since then it’s been doing its thing… So I just assume it’s still doing all the necessary stuff (especially that thumbnail build) that it should have done initially…
Yep I totally misread this.
10 minutes away from seeing where mine resume if I stay awake for another 10 minutes at 2AM.
The more I think about it though if it is truly doing them in the order they were added to the database, then if TV shows were added first then that’s a lot of VP thumb generation.
I think it will resume based on where it left off, but also time they were added. In his case, he added everything at once just recently, so reading top down in Directory would give him mostly an A-Z add, so all the timestamps would be mostly in alphabetical order. For you and I, who have been using it so long most of our files initially were added as A-Z, but since then, as we gather more content, it’s not in alphabetical order when you add it:
Think like this: I add 100 movies and shows all at once. It does that initial set as A-Z since that’s hwo they were added to the DB, but everything else gets done in order of the timestamp in which they were added…
(Sorry for “mansplaining”, I am sure you understood it right the first time, but others may not)
Exactly, which is why I suggested he just open up the Window and turn off any CPU limits till his initial run of content is done. Then he can enable those things, otherwise, he’s just going to have to wait till it hits Z and any content he’s added since start and that point, hehe…
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Not quite the case for me. 
I shut down my local server and am starting from the beginning with all my stuff mounted to Gdrive.
I just can’t be bothered with local media anymore when all my users keep telling me how well the online server runs.
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Ahh, nice… I haven’t run into that yet, and hopefully I won’t. Gigabit line, hopefully soon to be 10Gbit, and everyone setup to direct play/direct stream nearly 97% of content… It’s been a long road, but I much prefer keeping it here locally and using Backblaze as my online backup
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Yeah to be clear Gdrive “was” my backup.
Now local is the backup. I just don’t have the patience for 14 spinning disks and no performance gain.
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When I installed Plex I pointed the library to music first and I have not seen anything update in music, since I haven´t added anything to it. Then I created the TV Series and pointed it to the TV folder, but I set it for no thumbnails there, since we do watch most TV shows in one sitting. For the movies, well, I did leave the thumbnails for that on, and pointed the library to the appropriate folder, so I assume it read the directory listing and it´s doing the thumbnails sequentially from there.
I timed the generation, and it took 6 minutes aproximately to create 1 movie. I know it will take more fore longer films and less for shorter, but using that as a basis,6 hour per day times 60 minutes per hour times 13 days its been running are 4,680 minutes, divided by 6 minutes gives me about 780 movies. I did a select from the beginning of the folder to the L´s and it gave me 712 movies, so the math works out… So using that same logic, I will be here for another 2 months. The T´s are going to kill me…
I do have another machine available with no load, I can mount the movies to that machine and generate the thumbnails, but is there a way to copy/update them to the server once I am done?
I actually used that machine to convert 60+ avi/mov movies to mp4 so that now everything on the server is either mp4/mkv for movies and mp3 for music.
I am unsure where those thumbnails are stored, but it should be possible to migrate them back over once done.
What is the OS of the Machine you’d be using? Someone could possibly point you to that path, and then they would need the OS you’re moving to, and then someone could also give you that path.
Is there a reason you need to limit it to a 6 hour window and reduce CPU usage? If you increase CPU usage, AND take away the Window, it may do it all in a couple days, no?
Unfortunately not. They are stored in the Plex data folder and once created they require a flag added to the database. So unfortunately no easy restoration possible.
Yeah, that´s what I figured…
Actually yes, The NAS is at the offce and from 6am to 7pm it is used for office work and is available to all that work for me. I left a wide margin there since people do work early or stay late. From 7pm to 1am I have the plex maintenance window running, and from 1am to 6am I´ve left the NAS to sync to our off site storage facility.
Personally, I am one of those guys that will rather let the resources be used at a good constant speed, than forcing everything to the max. Lots of strain that way, and with Murphy´s Law, the day I do that is the day someone is going to need the NAS for a very important “thing”, and I´ll be hearing about it all month long…
Thinking about this, I wish we could set a second maintenance window (or several) and that way we could program them to run with more or less CPU and/or resources. I guess a feature request is in order, but from what I´ve read PLEX is a nice piece of software, but don´t expect changes or major updates to it anytime soon…
