Plex not responding anymore - Restart needed - DB Locked?

[Havohej]

I have had several stability issues in the latest couple of months, which surprised me because I’ve been using Plex for like 10 years and stability was never a problem. The problem I am having right now is that randomly the server stops answering to anything and the clients say the server is offline. A Plex restart is needed and things go back to normal. When this happens I see entries like this in the log file:

Mar 28, 2023 03:55:37.081 [0x81013c300] DEBUG - [Req#1cb7] 6 threads are waiting on db connections held by threads: 0x807761e00,0x80bbdc400,0x808897700,0x807678800,0x80c216e00,0x8080cc000,0x808cf3000,0x80bbdb000,0x80c216400,0x80ae61500,0x80c216900,0x807762300,0x807677400,0x80c215f00,0x81013d200,0x80cb0b300,0x80cb0b800,0x80cf5a100,0x80b6b0c00,0x80c215a00

It seems the DB is locked. If I refresh the client the number of threads waiting increases by one, I’ve seen it go to 26. Waiting for long time does not solve the problem, it seems whatever that is locking the DB never releases it.

[Havohej]

Someone in Reddit suggested the problem is with the blobs:

https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/13763w8/how_i_solved_db_lockups_frequent_crashing/

[Havohej]

OK, after several months I have “fixed” the problem. It turns out it was a hardware problem. One of the data disks was having issues, this was a disk only with videos on it, the DB is in another location. It seems when Plex is having problems accessing files in a library weird things happen. At the time my “solution” was always restarting Plex and of course the problem will be gone until in the background processes Plex tried to access a file with problems and then Plex becomes unresponsive.

So I suggest if you ever have these kind of problems you check the health of your hard drives. In my case it was not even the drive itself, it was a cable.