Plex server blocks access to media drive for other applications

Plex Media Server Desktops & Laptops
1

Server Version#: 1.22.1.4228-724c56e62
Player Version#: n/a

Media is on a WD drive. Server is running in Ubuntu on a Zotac nano. Networking is all Ethernet.
This problem started happening when I switched to version 1.21, but I’m not 100% sure what version I was running prior to that.

When plexmediaserver is running (as in being started only, not playing anything), it completely hogs the drive where the media is located. It takes 10+ minutes to save or open a document on the same drive. As soon as I do “plexmediaserver stop”, the drive becomes available to other apps again, instantaneously.
Plex itself works fine, streaming to any device is no problem, but it does something to hog the media drive 100% of the time even when no one is streaming. It is not the network being blocked, just reading from/writing to the drive. I’ve tried leaving the server running idle for several days (in case the server does some indexing or similar when started that takes a little while), but it never cedes access to the drive.

2

Plex doesn’t behave that way.

If you only have 10 Mbps or 100 Mbps (Fast) ethernet, then it’s very possible PMS is monopolizing the connect but it’s not blocking.

3

It does for me :slight_smile: I have reproduced it again, and again by simply leaving plex running. I see two things in the log:

  1. There are a lots of these lines every morning around 5am. No one is playing anything at that time. What is plex doing here?
    WARN - MDE: unable to find a working transcode profile for video stream

  2. There are a lots of these lines, again at around 5am. Is this what is causing the disk block?
    WARN - Held transaction for too long (…/Library/MetadataItem.cpp:9467): 0.260000 seconds

It also produces a bunch of “Plex Media Scanner Deep Analysis” files full of ffmpeg log lines.

Clearly plex is doing something regularly at 5 in the morning, and I doubt I need it; how do I turn it off?

4

That would be the server maintenance, and you are free to reschedule it to a better time slot where you (or your shared users are) not using your Plex server.
I cannot recommend you to turn it off completely.
https://support.plex.tv/articles/201553286-scheduled-tasks/

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