# Plex Transcoder Nice Priority

**URL:** <https://forums.plex.tv/t/plex-transcoder-nice-priority/478259>\
**Category:** Feature Suggestions\
**Created:** [October 19, 2019, 1:26am UTC](https://forums.plex.tv/t/plex-transcoder-nice-priority/478259 "2019-10-19T01:26:11Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![jedcred](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/plex/user_avatar/forums.plex.tv/jedcred/32/116848_2.png) [@jedcred](https://forums.plex.tv/u/jedcred)\
**Post date:** [October 19, 2019, 1:26am UTC](https://forums.plex.tv/t/plex-transcoder-nice-priority/478259/1 "2019-10-19T01:26:11Z")

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I’d like to suggest changing the current “nice” level of the Plex Transcoder to something slightly lower (thus at a higher priority) than 19/20 (I have 20 on my freebsd machine, but my linux machine has a max nice level of 19), such as something between 16-18. It looks like the only other Plex process with a nice level set is the system plugin (com.plexapp.system) at 15; everything else seems to run at nice level 0.

Another suggestion would be to shift the system process to 10 and have the transcoder run at 15, allowing for a bit more granularity. I don’t know what the standard is for niceness levels for low priority processes, but BOINC, as one example, runs at nice level 10.

In my case, I have other low priority transcoding jobs running at nice priority 19/20, and I’d prefer the Plex transcoder have more priority than those jobs. Thanks!

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**Author:** ![nibbles](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/plex/user_avatar/forums.plex.tv/nibbles/32/150497_2.png) [@nibbles](https://forums.plex.tv/u/nibbles)\
**Post date:** [October 19, 2019, 10:44pm UTC](https://forums.plex.tv/t/plex-transcoder-nice-priority/478259/2 "2019-10-19T22:44:40Z")

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I saw this hidden setting

```auto
BackgroundTranscodeLowPriority 1/0 Makes background transcodes lower priority than streaming when set to 1

```

and I wonder if you could investigate how it affects your nice levels. I would agree with a feature where we could set the nice level rather than a boolean, e.g.

```auto
BackgroundTranscodePriority integer [0...20] Sets the background transcode priority level. Default=10

```

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**Author:** ![OttoKerner](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/plex/user_avatar/forums.plex.tv/ottokerner/32/10079_2.png) [@OttoKerner](https://forums.plex.tv/u/OttoKerner)\
**Post date:** [October 20, 2019, 8:24am UTC](https://forums.plex.tv/t/plex-transcoder-nice-priority/478259/3 "2019-10-20T08:24:44Z")

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‘Background transcodes’ are transcodes caused by ‘mobile sync’ and ‘optimization’ jobs.  
This vwon’t change anything for regular “playback” transcodes.

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Volts](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/a5b964/32.png) [@Volts](https://forums.plex.tv/u/Volts)\
**Post date:** [June 9, 2020, 11:26am UTC](https://forums.plex.tv/t/plex-transcoder-nice-priority/478259/4 "2020-06-09T11:26:07Z")

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I also observed inconsistent `nice` values while I was trying to understand a different issue.

I might have some of these details wrong, and this isn’t a complete list. I’m not asking for granular controls - it would be easy to micro-manage these without much benefit.

I was mostly surprised by some of the values relative to each other, and in a few places where `nice` values aren’t set at all.

A `Plex Transcoder` process doing streaming video transcoding gets the maximum, most polite `20` `nice` value (on FreeBSD). It surprised me that this was `20` because streaming clients are dependent on these.

I observed another `Plex Transcoder` process doing streaming audio transcoding (& video remux, not transcode) with the default `nice` value of `0`.

For background media optimization jobs that don’t need EAE, the `Plex Transcoder` gets a `nice` value of `20`. But if the optimization job uses EAE (has AC3+), the `Plex Transcoder` gets a `nice` value of `7`. Weird. Lucky, I guess! 🍀

If `Run scanner tasks at a lower priority` is enabled, then the `Plex Transcoder` processes that do video preview thumbnail generation get a `nice` value of `15`. If that setting is disabled, they run at the default `0`.

`Plex Transcoder` workers doing audio extraction for Intro Detection, as well as the `Plex Media Fingerprinter` processes, don’t appear to obey `Run scanner tasks at a lower priority`. They get the default `nice` of `0`.