Plex and nVidia Shield after Experience 7.0 upgrade - TV Show library not accessible, dashboard not working, server is up, but libraries give errors

Plex Media Server NAS & Devices
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Hello,

I was quite excited about the latest Experience 7.0 upgrade, and the chance to finally use an external USB device as repository for my metadata, problem is that I’m having a lot of weird issues and bugs, and I’ve already reset the shield multiple times since the update. This is not acceptable.

The first issue I encountered was when I tried to migrate my library to the stick (btw, I’m using the SanDisk USB 3.0 stick that is suggested on the nVidia site). I configured the stick as adopted storage but the server wouldn’t come up after the migration. I decided to reset the Shield and start over again, this time using the stick as a normal USB external drive.

I managed to have my movies and tv shows libraries up again (after having to scrobble everything again) but I was quite happy because I could finally have space for my metadata.

I then started to encounter the issue related to the Agent not discovering new items: I temporarily fixed it by changing the agent for movies (it wasn’t possible for TV Shows) and I waited the patch.

The patch came last week, then I started encountering a new weird bug: the dashboard would stop loading and display a message that an error was encountered and to check the forums.

I’ve noticed that this was happening if I kept the TV Shows shown on the dashboard, and that by removing it the dashboard started working again. So I tried recreating the TV Shows library: now the dashboard worked, but after less than a day the problem started again. On top of that I was able to access the TV Shows and Movies library LOCALLY on the Shield with Plex and Kodi and on my PC via Chrome, but not on my mobile, where the TV Shows category always gave me an error (Movies were working fine).

Today I tried connecting remotely from a web browser and I faced a new issue: now it shows the server is up and running, but I cannot access server settings nor my libraries. I’ve tried connecting locally to the Plex Server from my PC (via teamviewer) but I faced the same error.

So the behaviour right now is the server going down after some hours, with no feedback about it (I use tautulli to monitor the status of the server, and I never received a notification of server going down)

I’m getting quite pissed at all these issues: I’m going to go on holiday soon (I hope), and one of the reason I bought the Shield was to have a Plex Server running 24/7 instead of using my windows PC.

Are these issues related to the latest upgrade? What should I do to fix it? I was using a Plex Pass subscription, but I’ve stopped it and I’m not going to renew it if I’m facing all these issues: it’s not acceptable.

After I’ll come back from work tonight I’ll factory reset my Shield (I hope for the last time again): should I use the USB stick as external storage or adapted? What should I do to ensure that I won’t face these issues again? The USB stick has been checked for corruption errors and it’s perfect. It is also formatted as exFAT, as I read it was better than FAT32.

Is someone facing these issues as well?

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I would recommend not using the stick. USB sticks are not really meant for that type of constant usage. If you can get a small external hard drive, that would be much better and will probably solve all your issues.

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Why nVidia is suggesting this specific brand on their site then? And honestly I don’t expect reading/writing metadata to be a high throughput operation that will stress the USB interface.

Honestly, what I faced look like software issues.

Not happy with Plex at all: what if I followed your advice? Should I have to recreate my libraries again? Losing another full day to configure everything?

Edit: remember that I’m talking about metadata: my video files are on a NAS.

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USB sticks are fine for generic usage, but with Plex, the metadata files are read/written constantly. It will even do simultaneous read/writes if it can, which USB sticks are not great at handling.

Plex added a new feature recently to allow you to move where your data is saved.

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Well, that sucks big time. I’d have preferred knowing that before wasting money on a USB 3.0 high performance stick, as suggested by the frigging hardware producer… Next time, talk with nVidia and make sure this information is CLEARLY conveyed to customers.

Just to be clear: what should I buy then? I don’t need much space because I don’t use video and picture thumbnails, and I’m the only user of my Plex Library, 99.9% of the time watching content over my local network. If the Shield had 32 or 64gb storage space I wouldn’t even put up myself with all the nuisance I’m experiencing.
I’m really pissed, that’s bad customer experience.

By the way: why not having the possibility to have the metadata on the NAS? I still serve my videos from there, don’t see a particular issue as it’s always up and is a reliable storage (because it’s a NAS).

Yeah, problem is that first time I used it the server never came back up and it forced me to recreate my libraries again… And I’m not the only one having issues…

One question though: why should the metadata be constantly read and written? I’m not scheduling massive updates of my library, I’m the only user of my content and there are no concurrent transcoding streams: this would be an issues using the internal memory as well then, and it’s a much bigger issues as I don’t see a way to swap the internal memory of the Shield.

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I’m not positive it’s the usb drive, just a guess based on my experience with them and how Plex works. USB drives, regardless how fast they are rated, just never seem to be fast enough. Another thing that popped into my head. Are you running ES File Explorer on the Shield? I found that program can mess up the drives too. You can try uninstalling that before anything else.

One of the pieces of the metadata are the database files that PMS uses. The type we use does not handle working well over a network. It leads to a lot of data corruption and slow responses. If you are familiar with making symlinks, you can technically symlink all the other folders inside of Plex Media Server to the NAS and leave the databases locally.

I’m not aware of this issue. Can you point me to a forum thread with that so I can look into it.

Ok, not constant, but a lot. Definite in terms of reads. Posters, descriptions, theme songs are all stored there. Your client may cache some of the data but it has to get it from somewhere when it does need it. So for example, if you call up a movie library, all the posters for every movie has to be sent to your client. If the client already has it cached, then it doesn’t need to read the posters from where the metadata is stored, but if it doesn’t have it cached, that could be a lot of files it needs to look up.

Yes, and why we added the ability to move the data to another source. An external hard drive would be better (an external SSD would be best) as they are designed for quick and simultaneous access.

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And again for the last two nights the Plex server crashed with no chance to recover. Had to restart the Shield - yesterday at least everything was working, today the TV show library is ■■■■■■■ I’m still not sure it’s related to the USB stick, because it always happen in relation to the TV shows library, which was the one that wasn’t adding new content recently and for which Plex had to release a patch.

Logs show a database corruption. I moved the metadata back again to the switch internal memory and today I will waste again my time recreating the library, but if the issue will happen again this night then I will be sure it’s not the USB stick but something in the latest update - I honestly still believe that’s the case here, because it happens during the maintenance task window.

edit:

update: even if I moved the library to the internal memory and destroyed and recreated the tv shows library, it still shows a corruption in the database. I’ve run the optimize database and clean bundle task, but again, I’m still quite confident there is something wrong is how tv shows are handled since the 2 latest updates.

I don’t have ES File Explorer installed. Regarding programs though, is there a way to gain ssh access so I can try to run some sqlite commands, instead of having to factory reset the shield every time?

edit2: it seems I have to do again another factory reset… Unbelievable.
I restarted the Shield and Plex is screwed: it shows another localhost server, and the “real” one still references the USB stick as the storage location for the metadata… So it seems I’ll have to waste another day recreating my libraries…

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If your database is corrupted, moving the data back to the internal memory won’t help as you are just moving the corrupted database.

If you did a factory reset, that won’t remove the files that got moved to the usb drive. You’ll need to format that drive manually from the Shield settings to remove the old data. Did you update Plex Media Server after the factory reset? The version that comes pre-installed is an old version. Please make sure to update that before creating your libraries.

If you still have issues, please provide the logs from Plex Media Server. If you can get to it from Plex Web, use the “download log” feature. Otherwise you’ll need to manually gather them from the Shield. https://support.plex.tv/articles/220347688-accessing-internal-storage/

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