I’ve been experiencing regular crashes as well, typically happens overnight and is not working when we come to use it the next evening.
I believe it started after the Windows 10 Creators Update.
I think the person in this recent thread is having the same issue as me:
I believe that EasyAudioEncoder is locking up which is causing plex to not be able to cleanup old encodes and eventually causes the server to become unresponsive. Like I said previously, the only way to delete the transcode folder after a crash and after I close Plex Media Server is to end the EasyAudioEncoder.exe process manually.
@thompry said:
The server has been crashing anywhere from 1 to 4 times per day for the past week or so. I have many logs saved for each one of the crashes and have attached one of the more recent below. The crash happened between 8:25 and 8:35 in these logs.
I don’t see any crashes in the time you mentioned. You logs stop at 8:34. I do see that just a few minutes before this, you had 17 different streams going. Then something happened and PMS received signals to stop all 17. I missed this earlier but checking your previous log, I see a similar behavior of having a bunch of streams all open then suddenly getting signaled to stop all of them.
This sounds more like a network issue. Maybe your router is getting overwhelmed by all the network traffic and it is crashing. This is possibly causing PMS to have issues. I will pass this along to the devs but it may be hard to figure out the issue. I think a better approach is to check your network and make sure your equipment is up to the task of handling the type of load you have. What type of router are you using? If it’s a cheap residential unit, you might need a better one.
I’ve been having very similar problems over the past few months except in almost all my cases, the plex server has already killed itself and the icon in the tray is just appearing until you move your mouse over it and then it disappears. I always check my crash log folder before restarting the server app but there’s never any logs 
@“MovieFan.Plex” said:
@thompry said:
The server has been crashing anywhere from 1 to 4 times per day for the past week or so. I have many logs saved for each one of the crashes and have attached one of the more recent below. The crash happened between 8:25 and 8:35 in these logs.I don’t see any crashes in the time you mentioned. You logs stop at 8:34. I do see that just a few minutes before this, you had 17 different streams going. Then something happened and PMS received signals to stop all 17. I missed this earlier but checking your previous log, I see a similar behavior of having a bunch of streams all open then suddenly getting signaled to stop all of them.
This sounds more like a network issue. Maybe your router is getting overwhelmed by all the network traffic and it is crashing. This is possibly causing PMS to have issues. I will pass this along to the devs but it may be hard to figure out the issue. I think a better approach is to check your network and make sure your equipment is up to the task of handling the type of load you have. What type of router are you using? If it’s a cheap residential unit, you might need a better one.
I don’t believe its a network issue as it happens many times when only 1 or 2 people are streaming and I never see anything in the crash report. Sometimes the plex icon at the bottom right is gone and other times its still their but the server is unresponsive and I believe this is when the transcoder has crashed. No matter which way it crashes I always have to go into task manager and end the rest of the plex processes before I can start the server again. Here is a log from last nights crash when little to nobody was streaming as it was at 3am. Note: I went back to an older version of plex to see if it would fix the issue and it didn’t.
(All of the logs I have posted are copied out of the plex directory after I end the plex processes and before I start plex back up)
I think I have found a temporary workaround for this issue. I did the following things listed below and Plex has been running for 5 days without a crash which is the longest its ran in quite a few months.
-
I have a task that kills the EasyAudioEncoder.exe process every 3 hours. (Plex starts the process back up when it’s needed)
-
I have a powershell command that I have set to run every hour to delete all transcode files that are older than 6 hours.
Note: Plex still crashed when I only had the old transcodes being deleted but hasn’t crashed since I started ending the EasyAudioEncoder process every 3 hours.
Thanks for your last post thompry. I too, am having the same issue you are and run a Cisco RV345 Dual WAN business router and have had no issues until recently with my Plex Windows server (Although mine is 2012 R2, but ONLY has Plex installed).
I’m going to give your workaround, but I may need to do a bit of digging as I don’t even see EasyAudioEncoder on mine at all…
Currently running the public version: 1.10.1.4602
Thanks!
@thompry said:
I think I have found a temporary workaround for this issue. I did the following things listed below and Plex has been running for 5 days without a crash which is the longest its ran in quite a few months.
I have a task that kills the EasyAudioEncoder.exe process every 3 hours. (Plex starts the process back up when it’s needed)
I have a powershell command that I have set to run every hour to delete all transcode files that are older than 6 hours.
Note: Plex still crashed when I only had the old transcodes being deleted but hasn’t crashed since I started ending the EasyAudioEncoder process every 3 hours.
@thompry , would you mind sharing your script?
Here you go:
- Batch file to kill the EasyAudioEncoder.exe process (I have this scheduled to run every 3 hours):
TASKKILL /F /IM “EasyAudioEncoder.exe”
- Powershell script to remove transcode files older than 6 hours. (I have this script scheduled to run hourly):
Get-ChildItem -path “C:\Users\Administrator\AppData\Local\Plex Media Server\Cache\Transcode\Sessions” | where {$_.Lastwritetime -lt (date).addhours(-6)} | remove-item -force -recurse
NOTE: I’m now on day 6 without a crash after setting this up.
Watching this one as mine started doing this daily (sometime twice daily) over the last 5 days. Nothing has changed, so really weird.
I just wanted to give an update and let you guys know that I am now on day 9 without a crash since setting up the above scripts.
After doing a fair amount of work, I believe this was a corrupt codec dll for me. I removed all directories under the Codecs directory and restarted, been running without issue so far.
Plex also is starting to crash all the time for me.
Try this powershell script i made, it worls like a charme.
The server stayed up and running for 12 days with my scripts without a crash. I upgraded to the newest Plex Server version (1.11.1.4730) and the server crashed within 12 hours.
Plex version 1.9.2.4285 and my scripts is what seems to be the most stable at the moment. Of course I get crashes galore if I don’t have scripts running on any plex server version.
@thompry said:
The server stayed up and running for 12 days with my scripts without a crash. I upgraded to the newest Plex Server version (1.11.1.4730) and the server crashed within 12 hours.Plex version 1.9.2.4285 and my scripts is what seems to be the most stable at the moment. Of course I get crashes galore if I don’t have scripts running on any plex server version.
If you have logs captured after the crash that would help get the problem fixed. A couple of common crashes have already been fixed in 1.11.1.4730 and confirmed as fixed.
@sa2000 said:
@thompry said:
The server stayed up and running for 12 days with my scripts without a crash. I upgraded to the newest Plex Server version (1.11.1.4730) and the server crashed within 12 hours.Plex version 1.9.2.4285 and my scripts is what seems to be the most stable at the moment. Of course I get crashes galore if I don’t have scripts running on any plex server version.
If you have logs captured after the crash that would help get the problem fixed. A couple of common crashes have already been fixed in 1.11.1.4730 and confirmed as fixed.
I stille crash with version 1.11.1.4730 
@chillumsen said:
@sa2000 said:
@thompry said:
The server stayed up and running for 12 days with my scripts without a crash. I upgraded to the newest Plex Server version (1.11.1.4730) and the server crashed within 12 hours.Plex version 1.9.2.4285 and my scripts is what seems to be the most stable at the moment. Of course I get crashes galore if I don’t have scripts running on any plex server version.
If you have logs captured after the crash that would help get the problem fixed. A couple of common crashes have already been fixed in 1.11.1.4730 and confirmed as fixed.
I stille crash with version 1.11.1.4730
Well it is a crash for which no one has provided logs for yet - the two crash bugs that we had logs for have been cleared
@sa2000 said:
@chillumsen said:
@sa2000 said:
@thompry said:
The server stayed up and running for 12 days with my scripts without a crash. I upgraded to the newest Plex Server version (1.11.1.4730) and the server crashed within 12 hours.Plex version 1.9.2.4285 and my scripts is what seems to be the most stable at the moment. Of course I get crashes galore if I don’t have scripts running on any plex server version.
If you have logs captured after the crash that would help get the problem fixed. A couple of common crashes have already been fixed in 1.11.1.4730 and confirmed as fixed.
I stille crash with version 1.11.1.4730
Well it is a crash for which no one has provided logs for yet - the two crash bugs that we had logs for have been cleared
Okay - But im never able to get the logs. im using this scrips til auto startup plex when it crashes.
I have attached the logs for this crash below. Plex Media Server.exe crashed then I ended the other plex processes manually before grabbing this log.
sa2000: Are you saying that the crashes from all of my previous logs were fixed in this latest version of Plex Media Server? Most of the replies I received on those logs states that they couldn’t really see a reason for the crash in them.
Logs Below:
@chillumsen said:
@sa2000 said:
@chillumsen said:
@sa2000 said:
@thompry said:
The server stayed up and running for 12 days with my scripts without a crash. I upgraded to the newest Plex Server version (1.11.1.4730) and the server crashed within 12 hours.Plex version 1.9.2.4285 and my scripts is what seems to be the most stable at the moment. Of course I get crashes galore if I don’t have scripts running on any plex server version.
If you have logs captured after the crash that would help get the problem fixed. A couple of common crashes have already been fixed in 1.11.1.4730 and confirmed as fixed.
I stille crash with version 1.11.1.4730
Well it is a crash for which no one has provided logs for yet - the two crash bugs that we had logs for have been cleared
Okay - But im never able to get the logs. im using this scrips til auto startup plex when it crashes.
GitHub - chillumsen/Plex-auto-startup-with-crash: This powershell script will fire up plex when it crashes.
Well the logs can be captured as soon as it restarts after the crash. If it is impossible to tell when this happens, then need to disable auto start, get the logs after the crash with debug logging and crash reporting enabled and then enable the auto start scripts
