Heads Up… No Android Server option above… put my query into ‘server-linux’
Like everything in life there are limits…
I need to know whether Plex has a physical limit to the number/size of any network attached Libraries?
Can anyone help address my problem…
I have 980 blueray movies and 36,000 music tracks in FLAC format.
I just find the whole PLEX Windows Client (currently testing) experience a very S L O W experience.
If I open a library the film placeholders are sometimes populated and if a scroll down a bit - no artwork appears… and then as if by magic one or two images appear… and so on and so forth…
I am prepared to sort this out - but before I start I need to know from anyone out there if they have managed to resolve this very ‘S L O W’ interface.
If the Nvidia Shield cant handle the software (is not man enough) then I can turn the page and move on and try and find another platform to be the server but all my reading leads me to believe the Shield should be capable of handling my ‘light’ usage… But right now it is unacceptably slow.
So my questions are these…
Does PLEX work on the Nvidia Shield (anywhere/anyone) such that the Libraries are always populated with artwork when viewing?
Are there know limits to file sizes and local available memory?
I do NOT want to use the SYnology PLEX implementation as the Synology 1515+ it would seem is not man enough to support 2 streams at the same time.
Is the Windows server implementation better… or put another way - ‘what is the best hardware environment’
I would look at running the server on something dedicated just for the server. NVIDIA shield is designed to play media, not transcode data. Take a look at this discussion on building a suitable rig for getting your data to your players. Upgrading PMS hardware
I’m experiencing exactly the same issues on my Shield Pro. I bought the box a month ago specifically for use as a dedicated Plex server.
If the box isn’t powerful enough to act as a server (even when doing nothing else), Plex and/or Nvidia should pull the server option. Just suggesting to use something else as a server is not a solution in itself - it’s like saying: “Buy this - and, if you don’t like it, buy something else instead”
If the box is, in fact, too wimpy for Plex, I’ll be pretty pissed, because I got the Shield as a replacement for the gutless performance of Plex on Synology NAS boxes.
I have nvidia-shield with ssd for plex server, to be fair if you have a couple of movie collection, plex server on Shield is OK, but if you have few thousands of movies and tv shows I don’t recommend using plex as a server because in the end it makes your shield to be too slow for anything else, even watching movies on Shield…
The problem is finding something with a cpu and gpu that are powerful enough to handle both the database transactions and hw transcoding - and have a lot of storage - while being small, quiet and not too power hungry for 24x7 operation. I’m going to take a look at the Intel NUC series, because they must have a model able to handle the load nicely - but we’re also looking at a significantly higher price.
I also have 5 home users and a couple of friends using it.
The ShieldTV has enough performance to handle that, the problem is PMS and the Plex app have their problems. I suggest you to check if you have debug logging enabled like I told you on my previous post.
Edit: I forgot to mention my media is stored on a low power NAS (HP Microserver N36L with OMV) with SMB shares mounted on the ShieldTV.
I have debug logging turned off, running the new Experience with media files offloaded to my NAS over gigabit wired - and it still moves like a turtle stuck in wet cement,
Wait for it to finish and wait a couple of minutes afterwards (10 to be safe)
Plex Web → Libraries (…) → Optimize Database
Wait for it to finish and then check the performance again
Sometimes after I add a large number of files to my library I notice the database queries becoming very slow but optimizing the database completely fixes it.
If that does not fix it, I suggest you to check if your NAS is the bottleneck (Samba shares are CPU heavy). You should check if you have any plugin misbehaving as well.
Reading up on the Shield a little more it should be able to handle the data. I would try optimizing like rbmaster7 suggested. If that doesn’t work I think the problem relies in the software defaulting to software transcode and not hardware transcode. see this link PMS hw transcoding doesn’t work
Well what an interesting thread and thank you all for your comments.
I have today returned my Nvidia Shield - 'thank you Amazing Amazon for your generous returns policy - I am sure the Nvidia Shield is a good piece of kit/hardware but it just sucks when running PLEX. I realise this is a software issue but given I bought the Shield to run PLEX there does not seem much point in persivering any more. I will now wait and see where things go from here.
By the by … I have been reading a very worrying thread on Reddit from PLEX users who are more than a little pissed off with the new interface and poor performance. Worth a quick read of the comments!! For the search parameter just enter ‘PLEX slow’
It is, but some users are experiencing it switching to software transcoding after a few seconds for unknown reasons which is extremely slow. You’ll need to log and see what it says. If I was you I would just get a dedicated low power server/computer for plex. Using android based plex is a pain.
I have a little bit more than that. I tested PMS and plex android on Shield against a part of my collection :
4560 movies
800 tv shows with total episodes of more than 23,000
This stuff is on several custom built NAS.
And I must say it just doesn’t work because of things below :
the current Android OS is never meant to be used for high performance, low latency background process that Plex is so heavily relied on.
In the case of nvidia shield, it still use NT1 or SMB1 protocol to mount NAS to be used for plex. And this is not stable, adds a lot of unnecessary layer to days traffic… I wish they use at least SMB2, nfs, or make it more reliable. I’m in the latest 7.0.1 preview and it is still the same.
Disabling debug log on PMS doesn’t change much because of above. And because of its young age of a server software written for real server being ported to ‘somehow’ work in Android. I’m excited of PMS future but in its current quality it works well only when you have some movie collection.
Last but not the least… Buggy, buggy, buggy plex for Android client app. Try to read the forum and read the app logs. If i get a penny every time I read error or crash in the app, i would be billionaire by now
But that’s fine, the one not so fine is the whole attitude of who i assumed the plex developer for Android app is apologist and relying on excuses that we have millions of android devices type out there so they felt like it was good enough to rely on users to report bug before they even take a look at the main problem. I get that plex trying to do so much in the background, but when most of your Android users complains about largely similar things, and the developer simply diss it out as ‘some vocal users will always complain’ then the problem is not on the buggy app but on the one who creates it. If they rely on reported bugs by users and not already have long list of bugs and problems they need to fix then that’s not good, which I think currently is happening for plex android client app.
I think here’s what needs to happen, plex needs to go back to basic. Basically plex is cataloging software for our media and media player. This 2 basic function needs to perform perfectly on Android. There’s currently way too much unnecessary transcoding when playing on plex for Android. There’s way too much error or cryptic problem during media playback on Android that from end users point of view, most likely they don’t care and they say : this sucks compared to VLC, mxplayer or whatever other player they use.
I agree with everything you said but I have to say… that’s a huge library! How much storage do you need for all of that? What’s your setup? I’m really curious about it. Good HDDs are expensive AF, redundancy and high availability make the overall cost a lot higher too…
Let’s just say I have lots of 8TB courtesy of my previous work place
My setup is very simple actually. I have 3 plex server, one on Shield, one on low powered server, one on moderately fast server. And lots of disks on NAS and network mounts.
No back up at all, I like to live dangerously and it’s easy for me to acquire back the data if any disk fail. All this time I had come back from two times 8TB worth of failure and it’s just works fine. My main plex server works perfectly, but my house hold is android /Google based so it’s very annoying to have pretty unreliable plex for Android.
