Plex Server Crashing Randomly

Plex Media Server Desktops & Laptops
67

I think that the issue that I am having is what is called a “deadlock”. Plex icon stays active in the system tray, but when I try to open the Plex web interface nothing loads. The clients are unable to play anything from the server as well (local and remote). I found an old post from 2018 solving an issue called “503 Service Unavailable”. To everyone else here experiencing the issue first verify that the Plex icon is still in the system tray (Windows). Here are the diagnostic steps outlined by @sa2000 in the previous thread:

Diagnostics for a deadlock / lockout (Windows)

  1. Prepare yourself by finding the server security token string as it will be needed for the connections list request. To find the token string, see this support article Finding an authentication token / X-Plex-Token | Plex Support
  2. When the problem occurs (and please wait for sufficient time before capturing diagnostics or restarting eg 10 minutes of requests to the server not getting through) , get the output from a specific browser request on the server. In a browser, go to this url http://localhost:32400/connections?X-Plex-Token=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx where you put the server token string instead of the xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx. Copy the displayed output to a text file and save
  3. Next is to force a process dump for the Plex Media Server.exe process. We can do this with Windows Task Manager - but on a 64-bit windows and with Plex Media Server.exe being a 32-bit application, you would need to load the 32-bit x86 version of windows task manager. So load this program instead of the default task manager C:\Windows\SysWow64\Taskmgr.exe
  4. Using this 32-bit Taskmgr.exe find the Plex Media Server.exe process, select it and right click on it and choose Create Dump
  5. Check that the dmp file has been created
  6. Restart the server and capture the zipped logs
  7. Zip the dmp files and upload to dropbox or similar service
  8. send me by private message link to the zipped dmp files and send the saved /connections output text files and the zipped logs

Now on step 8, the “me” is not me, but an actual Plex dev (like sa2000).

Here is a link to the old thread for others who would like to read more: 503 Service Unavailable - #91 by ninja6o4

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