Plex music scanning on iMac incredibly slow

Plex Media Server
1

Server Version#: Version 4.69.1
Player Version#:

Had Plex running from long ago, wanted to give it a try again for remote access to my music library on my imac (macos 12.2).
Hoping it will be able to import my itunes playlists from the .xml file (seem to be mixed reports on that, so figured I’d have it scan my library and see how things look).
With my long installed plex, pointed it at my music library, seemingly taking forever (multiple seconds per apple music track)
Figured things might be crufty, remove the plex library, app, cache (as per the plex directions), added 1 thing - my itunes music directory (190,000 tracks).
Same incredibly slow speed.

Thought maybe imac / macos as the problem
So on my SonicTransport, had it add the plex app, point it at my music dir - same incredibly slow speed.

Verbose logging was never on, even turned off standard logging. Still taking forever.
It says it’s scanning, and it’s using 100% of CPU (i.e. 1 CPU fully). No idea what it’s doing with that CPU burn. It doesn’t seem to be doing much I/O (not showing much in Activity Monitor → Disk for example).
Itunes library is stored on locally attached via thunderbolt software RAID array (and is fast enough for Roon etc).

Any thoughts? What speed should / could it be scanning at?
Roon on the same systems for example scans 10s, maybe hundreds of tracks per second…
Thanks.

–Peter

2

That’ll very much depend on what you’re doing while importing those tracks.
If you have e.g. enabled the sonic analysis feature and configured your server to do the analysis when adding new media (vs. running the analysis as a scheduled task during the maintenance window), this will require tons of CPU capacity.

Just adding your music should be faster but will also take a moment for Plex to perform the “regular” analysis of your songs.

3

I have sonic analysis etc disabled.
Oddly, after a while plex seemed to greatly speed up scanning - all my music tracks are now in plex.
Fighting to get plex to show my itunes playlists, but I’ll open a new thread about that.