For several years I ran my Plex server on a little NUC with a cheap 2-bay D-link NAS to store my media, and it was pretty good. Not really much use for transcoding, but browsing the server was pretty snappy and the whole thing was quite reliable. When the NUC and NAS started getting a bit old and wonky last year, I decided to replace them with a NAS that would could both run the Plex server and store my media. I did a bit of research and went for a DS416Play with a couple of 8tb WD Red drives. The reason I chose this was that it had good reviews, wasn’t the cheapest option, had an Intel processor (which seemed important to Plex), and had some mysterious video transcoding hardware which I thought might get supported by Plex at some point. The transcoding thing wasn’t a major consideration as most of my media is in formats I can direct play.
However, I’m starting to feel like this NAS is just not up to the job of running Plex - and I wonder whether my experience is to be expected, or if I’m doing something wrong? Any help or advice would be gratefully received.
I’ve got quite a bit of media, but nothing TOO crazy compared to some others I’ve read about on these forums. Under 2000 movies (split into different libraries by category to try and keep scanning times down), and maybe 7000 TV episodes (again, split into smaller libraries). Along with libraries for music and photos. Maybe 7tb overall.
Plex runs painfully slowly. I’m not talking about transcoding (as mentioned, most of my media is direct-played) - but the server itself. When I load a Plex app (FireTV, Android, iOS) - I’m generally faced with a blank screen, the libraries and content slowly appearing over the space of a minute or so. Often when browsing through Plex web (on the same network as the server), I won’t be able to access the dashboard or libraries at all - instead just getting messages like “There was an unexpected error loading the dashboard” or “There was an unexpected error loading this library.”
When I look at the Plex logs in the DSM Package Center, I see constant messages that seem to relate to database speed. “WARN” messages like “waited one whole second for a busy database”, “Held transaction for too long”, “Took too long to start transaction”, “SLOW QUERY”, etc. “ERROR” messages like “failed to begin transaction”, “database is locked”.
I did some Googling and read that this could be related to corruption in the Plex database, so - after trying all the various Optimise Database tips without success, I completely uninstalled Plex and removed all the Application Support stuff to get rid of the libraries and metadata. I then reinstalled the latest version, and started re-adding my media - but almost immediately (with only one or two movie libraries added,) I’m seeing exactly the same problems.
So … is this to be expected, or is something wrong with my Diskstation or Plex?
In researching this, I found that I bought my 416Play just before the more powerful 418Play was announced (argh!) - but, even so, surely it shouldn’t be this bad?
Thanks in advance for any help or advice you can offer!
Phil.
edit: One more point in case this is relevant: when I look at the Resource Manager in DSM, memory and CPU are never above 50%, while disk, volume and network fluctuate a lot, but tend to run pretty high.
