Plex Server suddenly using 90% of CPU when nothing is happening

Plex Media Server
1

Server Version#: 1.41.6.9685
Player Version#: not relevant

I just noticed extremely high, continuous CPU usage in the dashboard but can not find out why Plex needs that many resources.

Dashboard looks like:

  • Bandwidth: Averages: Remote — 13 Kbps | Local — 0 bps
  • CPU: Averages: Plex Media Server — 91.00% | System — 93.50%)
  • RAM: Averages: Plex Media Server — 6.62% | System — 18.24%

Here is everything I checked:

  • Activity tab (top right): empty
  • Status → Dashboard → Now playing: empty
  • Status → Alerts: last alert 25 minutes ago (“Library scan complete”)
  • Status → Conversions: empty

Am I missing something?

My machine is kind of overloaded at this point. Not sure what’s going on, but would really like to know how I can get more information about what’s happening in Plex and on my system.

Edit:
The CPU usage has been >90% for over 1 hour now. I checked all log files in PlexMediaServer/AppData/Plex Media Server/Logs - none of these have had any updates in the last hour. Except for the Plex Media Server.log, which updates only whenever I check the dashboard, and sometimes with INFO - AutoUpdate: no updates available or similar lines inbetween.

Edit 2:
Ok I found the culprit: I disabled the ad detection/skipper for my Movie library (which isn’t really needed anyway except for some specific TV recordings), restarted the server and now CPU usage is back to normal. Still weird tho that I can’t see anywhere what exactly is going on..

2

I was going to point you to this article: https://support.plex.tv/articles/201697383-why-is-plex-transcoder-using-my-cpu-when-nothing-is-playing/
But I notice that it currently doesn’t mention the ad detection. I will recommend adding that.

You can define when these analysations are performed, by setting them to be only performed “during server maintenance”. https://support.plex.tv/articles/200289526-library/
And subsequently defining the time window for scheduled tasks. https://support.plex.tv/articles/201553286-scheduled-tasks/

Pick a time when you are typically not using your server, but when it’s still switched on.

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