I had to get tech support from Apple to tell me that my 2 year old iMac with 8gb of ram slowed to a crawl because the Plex media server ate up all my resources. How can I fix this issue? I had to stop it from loading in the auto login items list.
Server Version#:I don’t know
Player Version#:
I suspect the two problems here are ‘server’ and ‘iMac’.
Use your iMac as a client, and run the server on a… well… server. Since Plex is a server app, it will use all the resources it can, because like all server apps, it expects to be the only thing running.
If you don’t want to spend much money, you could try running Plex on a Raspberry Pi or something. There are plenty of tutorials out there on how to set that up.
I just bought 32GB of ram to support this. Do you think that will solve the issue or should I just cancel the order?
I use the iMac as the server since this is where I download all my music and videos from. I mainly use Plex to watch movies on the Apple TV. Hence why I have it streaming from the iMac.
More RAM will certainly help, and may improve the responsiveness somewhat, but it won’t solve the basic underlying problem.
Plex is 32-bit, which means it can’t address more than 4GB on its own. It does however have a bunch of child processes which can also reference 4GB, which is why more memory isn’t a wasted purchase. But it’s really designed to be run on a server, with a server OS, with all the baggage that brings. You may find CPU is your next bottleneck, but give it a try. 
My CPU is 3 GHz 6-Core Intel Core i5. Is that fast enough or still going to cause problems? Either way I’ll update you with what happens. Ram should be here by tomorrow.
Plex will run fine on a home machine. I ran Plex on my home PC for years before I upgraded to a NAS, and as a matter of fact some aspects of Plex are actually better on Windows then they are on some sort of “server OS” like Unraid or whatever. It sounds to me like something else was going on and bogging the machine down. I would do whatever you were doing, check the dashboard and see if it is transcoding. Because you do not have a Plex Pass that will be done in software which can be pretty hard on a CPU. It’s also fairly common for a machine to slow down during server “updates” where you add a bunch of content, and it starts searching for metadata, extras, thumbnails, etc.
Also Plex is sort of meant to run all the time and can be a bit of a bear to load sometimes. So turning your machine on and off every day with it in the auto launch on startup or whatever Mac calls that can bog the machine down even further since it is already trying to get through booting.
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