Plex photos not working properly if web station is running

Plex Media Server NAS & Devices
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Server Version#: 1:14.1.5488 running on Synology Diskstation 214play, DSM v 6.2.1-23824 Update 6
Player Version#: Chrome 72.0.3626.121 on Mac Mojave

For some weeks, Plex has been working fine with music, TV shows and movies.

But only partially working with Photos.

It can see albums, and when I click on an album thumbnail, shows thumbnails of the photos in the album.

But if i click on a photo thumbnail, or start a slideshow, at best only the first few images will display, then I get a permanent ‘wait’ spinning Plex icon.

Furthermore, the rest of the NAS freezes, or at best slows to a crawl. And at worst, I can’t even shut it down or restart it either from the web Diskstation client or even the shut down/restart button on the Synology front panel. I have to pull the power plug.

Even after the occasionally successful restart via the DSM control panel, the whole Diskstation is VERY sluggish and slow.

Stopping my webserver and Wordpress website (including stopping Web station, Apache 2.2, mySQL, phpMyAdmin and PHP seems to fix the Plex Photo problem, but I want BOTH Plex and the web site to work.

Synology support have looked remotely, and say it seems to be a Plex problem, hence my request for help here.

Any ideas for how to further diagnose and fix the issue?

I can supply logs, if I’m told which ones are relevant.

PS. Now after a restart from the DSM control panel, my Plex client takes ages to connect, then stalls ‘lookng for servers’ (it’s usually instant at finding the server on my local network), then after another long pause “There was an unexpected error loading the dashboard”.

Music shows it is trying to index 18 new tracks in one album I’ve just added. But the browser indes tab shows the id of a photo I last tried unsuccessfully to load.

I click on Music in the left Plex panel, and get again the message “There was an unexpected error loading the dashboard”.

I look at Now Playing, and see Chrome coming to the end of a slideshow of a photo album I added two years ago, which used to work fine. i click on the X in the bottom toolbar to stop Photos trying to play.

When it stops, I try clicking Music yet again. Same error. So clear the browser cache, close the Plex tab, and try again.

Now NOTHING will show on the Dashboard - Music, TV Shows, Movies all dead.

I can’t even see how or where to start the “Plex Dance”. Wherever I click, if anything at all happens it happens incredibly slowly.

What next? Pull then power plug and restart the NAS?

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Thank you. That helps me to understand what may be happening.

I’d have thought processing photos was less demanding than transcoding video, which doesn’t seem to have a problem. But maybe it’s enough of a different kind of task so that Photos are actually asking more of the processor.

I had in the past left Photos running, thinking it might be choking on something, but even after a couple of hours I was still getting a Wait icon.

The files in that folder aren’t much different in size from others - around 4MB JPEGs - but there are over 90 of them.

Is Plex choking on resizing them to be able to display different sizes on request? Would it succeed if I just leave it running overnight or even for a couple of days?

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Thank you. There are many more photos in total, but only about 90 in this one folder.

Will do what you suggest later this evening or tomorrow.

J

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I went to the Photos/2016/Wedding folder, could see all the thumbnails, then clicked on the Play |> button above the display to start a slideshow.

The Wait spinning icon appears in the middle of the page, with a hazy greyish background but no image, then every few seconds it flicks a bit to the left, as if moving to the next slide, then comes back to the middle and spins again.

I’ve left it running while I go and do something else for a good while, then I’ll come back, see what if anything is showing differently.

Then I’ll send you the log files, either late tonight or tomorrow evening.

PS. The label in the tab above the window is displaying the image number of successive images in the folder, so it is scanning through them, but displaying nothing in the Plex display window.

PPS. Just tried on another folder with only 7 images, all smaller files too.
Plex grinds away with the spinning icon, then EVENTUALLY shows some of the images, but only after a long delay.

Scanning left and right with the arrow keys, three of the images in the ‘middle’ of the sequence are showing, but outside that small range of three, the rest just show the spinning icon, and this has persisted for many minutes.

Surely the processor isn’t so underpowered that it is the limitation? It’s a while back, in and in an earlier version of Plex on the same server, but I seem to remember it working then with a barely noticeable delay between photos. Now it’s slower than paint drying!

Some minutes later (maybe 10min) as well as items 4, 5 and 6 displaying a photo full size, item 7 now also displays.

And another few minutes after that, all 7 now appear.

That’s almost 15 minutes to display 7 photos.

Then when I go back to the Photos main page, I get an error message - “There was an unexpected error loading the dashboard”.

I clicked on Music, which opened after a minute or two, then back to Photos, and that (again slowly) displays all the photo folders. I pick the small 7-item folder, and large thumbnails appear almost immediately.

And then a slide show works without noticeable delay this time.

So maybe all I have to do is get Plex to Scan Library Files, and leave it running, for hours or days if necessary, to generate all the different image sizes and cache them?

I’m waiting for logs to generate and download, and will send them to you when done.

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Thanks for the advice. I’ll see which apps I rarely or never actually use, and uninstall them.

Thank you. That would explain why my web page is working! I misinterpreted the status of those apps that just say ‘Installed’ - I thought that meant they weren’t running.

I’ll do that.

I’ll try running the mp3 check program on a Windows machine.

By ‘not properly tagged’ do you just mean some tags are missing, or something else that I can fix? How do I find out which? From the mp3 checker output, or the Media Scanner Deep Analysis logs?

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Thank you. Just about to run the mp33checker.

I’ve uninstalled all the apps I don’t really need leaving Wordpress and ones it depends on. I have two versions each of Apache, PHP and MariaDB - Wordpress only needs one of each, but i’m not quite sure which. Will it matter much if I leave the others installed, but not running?

I also use Notestation and the DS note app on my phone, but have uninstalled all the separate media apps like DS Photo, DS Music etc. which Plex should replace.

I could move the web site to a different server, but it is a good deal more difficult to set up - one of the reasons I like the Synology NAS is that it was much easier to get the Wordpress site going on it than on a ‘native’ linux server.

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Part way through running the mp3checker on the Diskstation music files.

Many files say ‘no mp3’ (fair enough for album art, and other non-mp3 files.

I have some .flac encoded files, and some from iTunes labelled .ipa.

Some but by no means all of these say ‘Broken’ instead.

And I’m finding some files recorded from Internet Radio that ARE mp3 are also saying Broken.

I’ve just looked at the tags in one using the kid3 tag editor. It looks as if the tags are well formed, though some are marked ‘Unknown’ with a tick beside them, but empty data fields. I unticked those fields, saved the file, and re-ran mp3checker but it still reports the file as ‘Broken’

The file plays fine in VLC Player. And in the Plex link in Chrome browser.

So I’m a bit puzzled what to do about it.

Just seen your reply which crossed with drafting this.

I can indeed try to set up an alternative web server, or Plex server, on another machine - an old Dell server with several old VMs on it, including (IIRC) one or more WordPress installations.

I’d probably best wipe the server completely and start over though - much of what is there is no longer relevant, and the VMWare software that it runs on is years out of date. So it’s a non-trivial task to set it up again, but sounds as if it would be worth doing for one or both of the website and Plex, perhaps leaving other things on the NAS.

Going to have to stop for tonight. I’m finding that many if not most of the ‘Broken’ files are from Internet Radio downloads, some done automatically as music I might ‘like’ based on what I listen to. I’m listening to parts of the broken files, and find I don’t like them much! So will delete them.

Should I do this from Plex (which doesn’t always get rid of all the files in the parent folder, let alone the parent folder itself in the \Diskstation\music main folder, or just delete the whole parent folder using Finder, and expect that Plex will reindex things?

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Do you mean run the Plex server music mp3 files through an encoder again? I don’t always have original CDs, since some were recorded off radio or TV (legitimately, I hasten to add!)

Many thanks for your help and advice. I’ll ponder on what best to do, get the old server up and running, and try Plex on it first, I think.

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Thanks again. Too late to try tonight (just past midnight here in UK) but I’ll give it a go over the weekend.

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I’ve managed after several false starts to install Centos 7 as a virtual machine on my old server.

I’ve also installed Plex on it.

But I simply CANNOT get SMB file sharing to work, to allow me to copy or move files to the server.

I’ll start a new topic on this, I think, because it really isn’t the same subject as this one.

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I know.

But perhaps you could go so far as to suggest where in the file system to put the media files for Plex?

I’ll google to see if I can find a specifically CentOS forum.

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That would enable me to migrate the various media folders from the NAS to the new server, so thanks for the suggestion. It hadn’t occurred to me.

But I also need to be able to move new files recorded or transcoded on my Mac and/or Windows machine. Can Mac or Windows use NFS, I wonder?

I’ll look it up, and check the Hints and Tips as you suggest.

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FINALLY got Samba sharing to work - key (as I had thought) was to work out how to tell SELinux to allow R/W access. Once I found out how to do that, the rest was (fairly) easy.

And Photos are now working ok. I hadn’t realised quite how many there were. I started by copying over only the last few years’s worth, and that was 15GB and 2500 photos, in round numbers.

Will transfer the rest of my media in large chunks but over time, so as not to overload anything too badly.

Plex on the faster processor (I’ve given it two of the Xeon’s cores in the Virtual Machine) is having a much easier time coping, especially with the photo library, which now only hesitates for a second or two between photos in a slide show.

Thank you for your help. It seems it wasn’t, as I originally thought, a configuration issue, just that the processor on the NAS isn’t quite up to it.

But by gosh, it was a GREAT deal easier to set up Plex on the NAS. Took most of yesterday and a couple of hours today to get Samba to work on my old Dell server, and I don’t know how I’d have managed without it - perhaps NFS, but not sure.

I’ll leave the website on the NAS - it copes with that quite well, for low demand and occasional use!

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Thank you for your advice and help.

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