Media Server Stopped Working

Hi, sorry to bother you all. My media server randomly stopped working about a half hour or so ago mid-movie. All other internet and computer functions are working normally, but the media server just won’t open at all. All it does is read “connecting” in the internet tab in Firefox browser with the “spinning blue wheel”…any ideas out there?

how do you access your server?

I have this problem or something similar also.

Since the update at the beginning of March my Media Server has been randomly crashing. The server goes down without any feedback and has to be restarted. On the local side I still see the media server icon on the taskbar but the second I move the mouse cursor over the icon it disappears. Restarting the server solves the problem. Sometimes it will go for a day or two without crashing and then sometimes it crashes more than once in a day.

I have been unable to see any repeated triggers for the event because I have multiple people connected most of the time and it could be something they are doing; family have reported fairly consistently that when they go to launch something (after watching something different) the server is unavailable. On my end if I am watching something it just fails and displays server unavailable. If I am just passively sitting looking at the plex home page it disappears and displays server unavailable. As soon as I restart the server it refreshes and all is ok.

I have been on the Public update channel (just switched today to Beta) and I send my crash reports to Plex.

Any info I can provide to assist debugging is available upon request.

Please upload zip of the server logs obtained after the restart following a crash and it will be looked into

Of course you need to ensure beforehand that debug logging is not disabled on the server and that crash reporting is not disabled in server general settings

see
https://support.plex.tv/articles/201643703-reporting-issues-with-plex-media-server/
https://support.plex.tv/articles/200250417-plex-media-server-log-files/

The logs would have information that makes it possible to locate the crash reports
Also the debug logging for the period leading to the crash would help in the investigation

So make sure debug logging enabled
you say you already have crash reporting enabled
On next crash - restart the server and download the logs and attach the zip here

Ok, so the server just did the random crash, appears this time that it was my player trying to start a new program (that is just what the player was doing when the server crashed).

The logs are attached.

I have the DB zip also but it was 64MB so I did not try and post it; it is also available.

Thanks

It did not appear to create a crash report for uploading.

Is there any application exception entry in the windows application log at the time (about 09:55 am on 1st April)?
Run eventvwr.msc and select Windows Logs and then Application log

And could you see if disabling hardware acceleration for the Plex Media Server transcoder makes a difference

There is an entry at that time:

Faulting application name: Plex Media Server.exe, version: 1.12.1.4885, time stamp: 0x5aac03a1
Faulting module name: ntdll.dll, version: 10.0.16299.248, time stamp: 0x3a21d961
Exception code: 0xc0000374
Fault offset: 0x000da879
Faulting process id: 0x3134
Faulting application start time: 0x01d3c8a10831ce5d
Faulting application path: C:\Program Files (x86)\Plex\Plex Media Server\Plex Media Server.exe
Faulting module path: C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32
tdll.dll
Report Id: e20b1c1b-a7e4-4486-b1fd-7879625a3328
Faulting package full name:
Faulting package-relative application ID:

I have turned off Hardware Acceleration - though this has been on since well before the errors started (the day of the update at the beginning of March).

I have just reviewed the Event logs in a bit more detail, seems I was not quite right on the timeline, the errors started 2018-02-19, here is what a filtered list looks like.

Only one of those is another Application.

It is a heap corruption crash c0000374 and that could be why Plex Media Server failed to create a crash report. Crashes like that (and also ones to do with memory allocation failures) most of the time fail to create crash reports

We could get windows to create the dmp file and then you could let me have zip of the dmp plus logs

See section giving regedit for dumps handled by windows here https://support.plex.tv/articles/201455336-crash-logs-plex-media-server/

I tried following the instructions at the link provide but I already have a “LocalDumps” key in the registry … which has many entries under it so not quite sure what to do.

@Buzzard-Plex said:
I tried following the instructions at the link provide but I already have a “LocalDumps” key in the registry … which has many entries under it so not quite sure what to do.

may be there is windows captured set of dmp files
Have a look at %LocalAppData%\CrashDumps

There currently is no files in that directory:

If there are a set of crash dump files after the next crash (presupposing that there is one now that hardware transcoding is off) will the files be there only until I restart the server? Or in other words, do I have to get the files before I relaunch?

Crash reports do sometimes get processed in line rather than after restart - so no guarantee would still be there - worth a check

But there was no indication of any attempt to process - so my guess is that the dmp file did not get generated

See if the C:\users\xxxxx\xxxxx\appdata\local\CrashDumps has any

Could you check what settings you put in the LocalDumps area in the registry
See https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb787181(v=vs.85).aspx for details

Ok, sorry for leaving this open for so long but it appears that the problem is solved … and I think it was the Hardware Acceleration; I must have turned it on in the options right about the time of the update that I thought was causing the problem. Sorry for the confusion I caused.

The system has had a single random crash since I turned off the Acceleration and the symptoms were slightly different from before which is why I waited to see if I got any more crashes.

Thanks guys.

A number of users have had crashes within the Nvidia driver nvcuvid.dll