Does anyone know if there is a way to Optimise Database and Clean Bundles to occur more often than once per week?
I am seeing around 200GB becoming available after a cleanup which is essential space for metadata.
I’m not aware of an option to do this automatically more frequently.
That being said, I doubt that’s going to be your everyday saving of space. It’s more likely Plex hasn’t been doing this for some time or you just had a major change to your media (e.g. massive file deletion orgy or redoing a library with a new agent).
Moved PMS install to an external SSD (1TB) on the Shield. Added music library but PMS crashed during indexing due to no free space on the external (tried this twice).
Remotely deleted some bundles, restarted and it came back to life. Copied back deleted bundles, via GUI Cleaned Bundles and Optimised DB which gave me 196GB back.
Was hoping this drive would be sufficient just to store PMS/Metadata but starting to think its not if it can’t be regularly cleaned.
If anyone at Plex is listening, I did also notice Album Art is 200-300Kb per album image - would be nice if PMS could optimise that too.
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I can only comment on that part, but 200-300 Kb per album image is pretty low. A high-quality album art is usually between 1 and 2 MB, so it’s already not in very hig hquality. Reducing the size would mean getting a really crappy image, plus even with a thousand albums it’s only a few hundred megabytes after all.
I agree its important to have high quality covers, just not thrilled to have 1TB worth of metadata. SSD drives above 1TB start getting expensive and metadata understandably can’t be stored on my NAS so was hoping Plex might be able to streamline the metadata like Apple did with HEIC images for example.
You don’t get 1 TB of thumbnails. Currently, with 2000 albums it’s not even taking a single gigabyte, so it’s not a problem. Also, HEIC is useful for photos, not so much for album arts.
How much data do you have in your library (how much movies/episodes of series/albums)?
Disable the video preview thumbnails. Why is my Plex Media Server directory so large? | Plex Support
Disable “Empty trash automatically after every scan”. This should prevent your server from removing and adding media over and over, which produces some cruft which is then removed at server maintenance time.
@OttoKerner - disabling the video preview has always been done on all libraries except photos and home videos which there are only a few hundred.
The majority of storage is used by Movies, TV Shows and Music.
TV Shows Episodes: 4361
Movies: 1929
Albums: 78,127
Photos: 18,201
Just my personal opinion: with a media collection that big, you should think about abandoning the Shield as a server platform. It just isn’t made for that.
that’s a fair point - unfortunately my Syno NAS has the opposite problem - plenty of storage but no SSD so its a lot less responsive not to mention limited transcoding. Might have to build a NUC I guess.
Ended up resolving metadata storage issue so thought to share:
Music metadata was the storage hog (music indexed to “F” using 0.97TB on Shield external 1TB SSD causing it to crash when it got full with no warning)
Solution: Install 2 servers
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PMS1 on Shield (moved PMS to external 1TB SSD) indexing Movies, Shows, Photos, Music Vids, DVR, RecTV (using 30GB) media source = NAS.
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PMS2 on Synology NAS (indexing Music - don’t care about metadata size)
The logic behind 2 servers is mainly due to most NAS devices not being as good as the Shield at transcoding and not as responsive. In my case my NAS is also running 12 docker packages, mail/web server etc etc so the Shield is much more responsive. Since Music playback doesn’t require any CPU intense transcoding the NAS is perfect for large music libraries.
Additionally it may be helpful to know PMS can use terabytes of storage for large music library metadata.
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