Plex slow and crashes on photos

General Discussions Plex Features
1

When I look at photos on plex it is extremely slow and sometimes freezes and crashes while viewing photos. (there is 10s-100s of GBs most likely 20ish years of photos)

Viewing photos in explorer is faster and easier :confused: for several reasons and I am curious if its a setting issue.

  1. it only loads as you scroll. Is there a way to get plex to load and buffer 2+pages of photos/videos in viewer (would be nice if that happened universally like in program viewer and videos)? So it is loading below what is view-able? Can it also maintain what has already loaded? If i scroll down it is poping and loading and if i scroll back up it has
    to reload the pictures and it is very annoying. Scrolling and load popping is very annoying.

  2. What settings and things can I do to speed it up? keep it on SSD? cache drives (SSD/Primo cache?)? Some setting that maxes out my servers resources?

  3. I dug through the settings and i think i enabled everything i could like cache and thumbnails and stuff but maybe I am missing something.

DVR
HomeRunHD Prime

System specs:
-4.2GHz 1650v3
-64GB of ECC DDR4 RAM
-480GB Sandisk Extreme Pro for OS
-SnapRAID
All HDD 7200RPM
5x6TB Parity
7x(2x3TB RAID0) data
2x6TB data drives
-Plex is on a 2x3TB RAID 0
-10GbE Intel NIC (WIP still on 1GbE)
-980TI (will be switched to 750TI once desktop is fixed)
-Win7 64 OS
-Norco 4224 case
-EK Predator 360 cooler
-LG BD drive
-EVGA 850P2
-Tripplite 240v UPS

2

When I look at photos on plex it is extremely slow and sometimes freezes and crashes while viewing photos. (there is 10s-100s of GBs most likely 20ish years of photos)

Which client are you using, is this on the web app?
Are you browsing the timeline view or just the regular Photo (folder) view?
What is the total count of photos in that library?
Have you tried to run a Database optimize (https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/200392106-Library-Actions), did that help with anything?

Sorry for all the questions but the more I know the better.

An SSD for both your Plex installation (where the Plex database resides) and photo files will generally always improve performance but obviously that’s not always feasible. With photos, as you have a lot of them, access time for your disks becomes more important than raw throughput which is where the benefits of solid state storage would start showing.

We’ll always try to provide a good experience for the majority of users who don’t have high-end hardware setups but if you have very large libraries with many users then you will start noticing the limitations of the hardware.

Your hardware seems like it should be up to the task so let’s try to sort something out.

3

@drzoidberg33 said:
Your hardware seems like it should be up to the task so let’s try to sort something out.

it’s got very little to do with the hardware. Photos are just darn slow in Plex.

forums.plex.tv/discussion/270821/photo-libraries-are-too-slow#latest

4

@drzoidberg33 said:

When I look at photos on plex it is extremely slow and sometimes freezes and crashes while viewing photos. (there is 10s-100s of GBs most likely 20ish years of photos)

Which client are you using, is this on the web app?
Are you browsing the timeline view or just the regular Photo (folder) view?
What is the total count of photos in that library?
Have you tried to run a Database optimize (https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/200392106-Library-Actions), did that help with anything?

Sorry for all the questions but the more I know the better.

An SSD for both your Plex installation (where the Plex database resides) and photo files will generally always improve performance but obviously that’s not always feasible. With photos, as you have a lot of them, access time for your disks becomes more important than raw throughput which is where the benefits of solid state storage would start showing.

We’ll always try to provide a good experience for the majority of users who don’t have high-end hardware setups but if you have very large libraries with many users then you will start noticing the limitations of the hardware.

Your hardware seems like it should be up to the task so let’s try to sort something out.

Sorry been busy.

I have used both (web and desktop app). I even try it on the server and its painful. The issue with photos is it only loads them as you scroll and than it dumps the loaded images when you keep scrolling. It refuses to maintain anything in the memory.

It also crashes plex when you load enough of them that the whole thing crashes.

When i restart i’ll update with how many photos and different drives are in it. I have plex server turned off ATM to run snapraid since DVR is freaking retarded and has temp folders in my array!!!

(this is the biggest update you could do)
It also refuses to load unseen photos. Like preloading 1-2 pages of photos in either direction. Thats the biggest issue. If it loaded off screen photos and buffered it would be 1000s of times better. Is there a way to force that?

What does optimization do?

Waht type of screen shots will help? I can post screen shots if helpful.

EDIT: there are ~62,000 photos in my library. My second library is ~47,000 images

The first few pages of photos loaded and than after that nothing happens. It won’t load new photos or old photos it already loaded. Just a bunch of dark gray boxes.

Also I know the photo loader is single thread limited. It is obvious via task manager and between different computers with different single thread. For is plex viewer single thread? This is the easiest thing to have threaded…