I am trying syncing to my windows 10 laptop. I have to use the windows app because without it, the plex desktop app does not support syncing. Things are syncing, but they are going extremely SLOOOOOWLY.
The laptop is connected via a 1Gbe, USB 3.0 ethernet dongle so it is capable of pretty good speed. I don’t think it is achieving Gb speeds, but I know it is not bottlenecking the transfers. When I copy files directly to the laptop I achieve speeds around 200 Mbps. Not blazing I know, but much better than I’m getting when syncing plex. With nothing but plex active my average transfer rate fluctuates between 25 and 50 Mbps. What is most unusual is the manner in which these speeds are achieved. The transfer is not a constant transfer, it is a very regular pattern of short bursts. I have attached a screenshot that shows a minute of two of traffic. Watching the actual numbers below the graph they will be something like 70.1, 0, 70.2, 0, 16.1, 0 (repeating) which correspond with the peaks and valleys of the graph. Occasionally the magnitude of the peaks will change, but the rate of change is slow so the pattern will remain consistent for any short period of time.
Keep in mind, when you ask the Plex app to sync, it creates a new version, optimized for your device. The Plex app cannot play all types that Plex Media Player can play. Thus, it will not take the file you have and simply copy it to your device.
Without further details, such as your process list, it is hard to say for sure what it is doing. That would be my first guess though…
Keep in mind that the media is transcoded BEFORE transferring to the client PC so transcoding should not have a significant impact to the transfer of a given file. Transcoding should only have an impact on the file transfer due to CPU and LAN usage related to the transcoding of other pending files.
I’m still not sure what causing the funky file transfer, but for the moment at least it is not a problem. Over the weekend I upgraded the M.2 SSD in my laptop to a larger one. This required me to restore the original factory image, and after installing Plex transfers were much faster. Peak transfer speeds were about 10 times better, and the rate was more constant instead of the odd pulses. I still have some software to install so I’ll watch as I go to see if anything reduces speeds again.
Good point. I don’t sync media. I did it once as a test, outside of that I don’t use Plex in this way. Forgot that it transcodes it before it copies the file.
