My Linux desktop notified me of a partition filling up, and I checked to see what is happening. /var/lib/plexmediaserver/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Metadata was over 15GB! Digging a bit deeper, I found lots of music albums with more than expected in Albums/#/########/Contents/tv.plex.agents.music. Here is a file usage graph of one of the folders in Metadata/Artists. The bundles are labelled as the inner ring, and each ring outwards shows proportionate use of nested folders and files. The largest outer segments are individual image files, the largest one at the outer red segment is 11MB. I’ve already removed a bunch, but as you can see, this potentially doubles or triples the required space. A hard limit, or better, a configurable option for file size limit would be a nice solution.
In most of the tv.plex.agents.music folders were images at a range of scales from a few dozen kb to well over 10MB!!
Here is a screen of my settings for the collection:
There are several answers here. Which is the most palatable?
Initially, poster/cover art size was low resolution images. Users complained at the lack of quality. Engineering re-evaluated and agreed. It was increased.
The amount of space used is obviously in direct proportion to the number of items indexed. 50,000 movies will consume about the same metadata space as 50,000 songs. Which is more likely to occur?
Linux distros make the root partition very small if a /home partition is selected during installation. This creates the pressure-point on available disk space.
There is an easy way to work with whatever the distribution is doing. The most common is to relocate the metadata to the /home partition.
For secondary reference: I have about 20,000 total items (movies, episodes, and music) indexed. I am using just about 35GB for the entire metadata. The actual media itself consumes some 48 TB
Thanks! I totally get the desire to have decent quality art. I’m not questioning that, but I have a larger music collection than that, and don’t want duplicated 4k or larger art for every album. So while I appreciate your time, I’ll have to find a solution with a leaner footprint, at least for my music.
