It seems like ever since becoming a Plex Pass member 2 or 3 years ago, my Plex experience has been steadily declining. It is excruciatingly slow to load TV shows on every device: Android phones, PC using web or client app, Macbook, Ipad, Samsung Smart TV, Wireless and wired connections. It used to be so fast. My server is set up to optimize automatically on a regular schedule. When I click on my TV Shows library, I usually have to go back and click on it again 3 or 4 times to get anything to show up. Any suggestions?
I also wish the interface worked more like Netflix. It’s very clumsy to get a TV Show series to play continuously, and to skip through episodes. I hope that is cleaned up soon.
Have you checked your hard drive’s health lately. Slow access is a common sign of a failing hard drive. If your drive is fine, the server log of you accessing your TV library might help shine some light.
Not sure what you mean about the continuous play feature. Hit the play button from the show level and it should start at the current episode OnDeck and continue playing.
I ran CHKDSK and there were a few errors that were automatically fixed, but it’s a relatively new drive and nothing else that runs on my server is having trouble. The drive I checked is the storage drive – not the system drive. They are separate on my server.
My problem with that is when I first open plex, it conveniently shows a list of recently watched. If I click on one of those shows to continue where I left off, it plays that show and stops at the end. If I want to continue where I left of and have it run continuously through the episodes I need to navigate through my library, find the season I want, and try to remember what episode number I left off on. Also, sometimes I just want to scroll through episodes and find where I want to start and have it keep going, but instead I have to back out to the show level after I find what I want. It’s kind of clumsy. I wish I could just set it to autoplay by default, and have the option to set a number of episodes to autoplay before requiring a prompt before continuing (like Netflix).
A bad drive was just 1 possibility. If you’ve ruled that out, I’ll need to see the PMS logs to see if there are slowdowns with PMS.
For continuous, which app are you using? Some of the apps have an option where playing from OnDeck will play the next episode, some do not have this feature yet. For the apps that don’t support this, I understand this adds a few extra button presses.
Here is one of the logs. It looks like there is a lot of activity. Maybe some bad plugins installed?
There appears to be a lot of activity with your music libraries. Can you provide me all the logs for the plexmusic and lastfm agents?
Yeah. It’s strange. I have a large music library that I never use on plex. It’s been there for years. Why is it working so hard on that library? Maybe I should just remove my music library from Plex.
I haven’t looked at your logs yet but do you have PMS set to automatically update your libraries when a new file is added? If you then have another program that also monitors your music files, if they cause the date on the file to get changed, these will get re-scanned. Older versions of PMS would ignore music files with that setting, but recent versions of PMS have improved on music scanning and is much quicker now so they are no longer ignored. But this can cause issues like you see if there is a conflict with another program.
I have the first three options checked:
Update automatically
Run partial scan when changes are detected
update my library periodically (daily)
Seems like that might be redundant. I would like newly added files to be included in the library quickly, but not if it’s going to be at the detriment to the server. I’m also not sure if this is what is causing the lag. I get lag all the time, whether or not it is scanning for media.
I’m still not having any luck. I think I’m going to uninstall/reinstall plex server. What are the implications of doing so? Should I back anything up before doing this?
