I need some help in troubleshooting my mac mini Plex server where just the Plex server keeps crashing. Its happened about 8 times over the last couple of days, but my debugging skills are somewhat limited. I am not sure if it is triggered from certain clients, but when trying to see if I could reproduce by interacting with the Android TV app, it did it again. I can see various occurrences of “crash”, but I don’t know how to correlate this between the different log files to help troubleshoot. Can someone with any knowledge of doing this, help me debug?
I had a similar issue a couple of days ago, immediately following an update to the Plex app on my Apple TV 4K. In my case, every time I navigated to Live TV & DVR in the Plex app, the Plex Media Server running on my Mac would crash. It only happened with that specific client. I ended up resolving it by deleting and recreating my DVR on the server. The last line in my Plex Media Server log after the crash was similar to the last line I see in your Plex Media Server.1.log file:
Nov 30, 2019 10:53:00.706 [0x70000e327000] DEBUG - Request: [192.168.0.20:37230 (Subnet)] GET /tv.plex.providers.epg.cloud:12/hubs/discover?count=50&excludeElements=media%2Cvast%2Ctopic&excludeFields=summary&includeRecentChannels=1&includeTypeFirst=1&promoted=1
It looks as though the last thing shown in this log was an attempt to navigate to Live TV & DVR. So, maybe check that.
Thanks for the quick response. I have just done what you suggested and am now watching something. Lets see if moving around different sections can trigger a crash again.
Question - I want to try and understand the debugging process a little better. Does it create a new file i.e. Plex Media Server.log -->Plex Media Server.1.log when it Plex server restarts (either via crash or manually)? If thats the case, is it therefore the last few lines of the .1.log file that would contain the clues to the crash?
My experience is, at least on my Mac, that a new Plex Media Server.log file is created under two conditions:
Normal log rotation.
Server startup.
In either case the oldest log is rotated out (Plex Media Server.5.log) and everything else is rotated up. This is just the behavior I have observed; there may be other conditions which trigger log rotation and the creation of a new log.
I have been running Plex Server on a Mac mini with a HDHomeRun Freeview DVR for a few years now with no real issues. Some problems with the EPG a few months back but all in all a stable solution.
But this last week I have had multiple Plex Server (1.18.2.2058) crashes on a range of clients on Apple TV (2.11.2), iPad & iPhone, when running the DVR functionality. Solution as stated on this thread was to delete the DVR instance from the Plex Server and reinstall the DVR instance from scratch.
Have been running for a few hours now and no Plex Server crashes so far fingers crossed.
