I will ask BigWheel how he interrogated the crash/dump file and hopefully the answer should be able to help a few others who seem to be having a similar issue. Keep an eye on this conversation.
Cheers
Your server logs number #1 is the one before your last restart and had activity at like 3am. That was the last things it was doing before it crashed. and there are lots of errors in it. Things that happen in the middle of the night are usually scheduled tasks related.
Your crash log to me just indicated there was a corrupt file or memory. but I admit I am not an expert at reading them.
so i just scrolled thought the server logs looking for errors and what it was processing during those errors and that was intro detection for The Wire.
You seem to have multiple bad files of the Wire. where plex cannot find the video stream in them.
Nov 10, 2020 03:00:43.438 [0x700003126000] DEBUG - IntroDetector: Running intro detection for [3259] [The Wire] [3]
Nov 10, 2020 03:00:43.438 [0x700003126000] DEBUG - Activity: registered new activity 2424b76a-d831-4cd7-bd4b-34a521bb7db6 - Detecting intros
Nov 10, 2020 03:00:43.446 [0x700003126000] DEBUG - Downloading document http://127.0.0.1:32400/library/metadata/3260
Nov 10, 2020 03:00:43.448 [0x700003126000] DEBUG - We're going to try to auto-select an audio stream for account 1.
Nov 10, 2020 03:00:43.448 [0x700003126000] DEBUG - Selecting best audio stream for part ID 5768 (autoselect: 0 language: en)
Nov 10, 2020 03:00:43.448 [0x700003126000] DEBUG - Audio Stream: 7515, Subtitle Stream: -1
Nov 10, 2020 03:00:43.449 [0x700003126000] DEBUG - MDE: video has no video stream but does have an audio stream
Nov 10, 2020 03:00:43.449 [0x700003126000] DEBUG - MDE: video has no video stream but does have an audio stream
Nov 10, 2020 03:00:43.449 [0x700003126000] DEBUG - Cleaning directory for session a11c37e9-d1b5-45d2-b95f-4939f792dfed ()
Nov 10, 2020 03:00:43.449 [0x700003126000] DEBUG - Starting a transcode session a11c37e9-d1b5-45d2-b95f-4939f792dfed at offset -1.0 (state=3)
Nov 10, 2020 03:00:43.449 [0x700003126000] DEBUG - Streaming Resource: Added session 0x7fad29f15bc8:a11c37e9-d1b5-45d2-b95f-4939f792dfed
Nov 10, 2020 03:00:43.450 [0x700003126000] DEBUG - [Universal] Using local file path instead of URL: /Volumes/3TB Data 02/TV/The Wire/Season 3/S03E01 Time After Time.avi
and a bunch of errors started happening after that so that is why I just asked about one of those Wire files. if you test again with intro detection back on I would remove the entire Wire folder.
@zanc I responded in the topic you made about your crash.
Thank you,
I removed the whole show (The Wire), reset the âdetect introâ settings and waited overnight. Fortunately, PMS did not crash, so it would appear that this has resolved my issue, which is great news !! so thank you for that. However, what I cannot understand is why versions of PMS after 1.19.1.2645 crashed yet, that version and earlier did not, despite the âdodgyâ files being in Plex ? To me, it would suggest that PMS has lost a level of resilience after .2645
For those who are having similar problems, I would suggest looking at the Server logs, seeing if you have any corrupt files in your Plex libraries and removing them.
Cheers
Definitely good news
Absolutely,
I will now try to help others with this issue. However, you can see how if one version of PMS works but a later version doesnât then, the logical explanation is there is a fault with the later release of PMS. As stated, it looks like there was a change which lessened resilience, that explains why files in Plex for some considerable time, would suddenly caused it to crash overnight.
All good stuff, especially as the issue is resolved and my library is cleaner, although better error reporting may have been a more friendly way of identifying the issue.
Every day is a school day, as they say 
Interestingly, even though PMS did not crash last night, I still created logs and search for errors in the Plex Media Server 1.log file (under the IntroDetection category and low and behold, I found more problematic files that wouldnât play. They were .AVI files, again, but even though they were broken, they did not cause PMS to crash.
All very confusing but I will go through my Plex library and inspect all .AVI files
Cheers
Following up here, turning off intro detection stopped my over night crashes. Unless I didnât get the logging set high enough I didnât see a particular file that it was hanging up on noticed above.
Iâm going to sweep through my library and temporarily remove any .avi files and see if I can turn into detection back on and see what happens.
Just try what I suggested. I :-
- Created log files
- Open and searched Plex media Server 1.log for IntroD and removed the files with errors from my Plex library
That fixed my issue.
Also the faulty files would not play in Plex, so you can easily test them.
Good Luck
2 Likes
I searched my logs and I wasnât finding anything when I filtered for IntroD surprisingly.
Are you sure you are searching Plex Media Server.1.log ??
Full name to search for is IntroDetector:
Timestamp should be 02:00 in the morning
Cheers
** If you upload your log file, I will have a look for you **
O M G !!
My PMS crashing overnight, every night, has plagued me for months. It was crashing around the same time every morning (in the 4am hour) which led me to believe it had something to do with an automatic task. Iâve searched and searched and searched around this forum until landing on this post a few days ago.
As tk007b suggested, searching for IntroD in my Plex Media Server.log file was the key to unlocking my problem. I found 3 files (all TV shows) that were erroring out. Where my situation differs is that none of the 3 files were .avi format. Two were .m4v and one was .mp4. Instead of deleting them, I went into Plex and tried to play them to see what would happen.
- One of the
.m4vfiles said it couldnât play due to DRMâŠ
- The other two files (one a
.m4v, the other a.mp4) were popping an error message in the player itself â âError code: s1001 (Network)â
The error message and this thread led me to a recently-launched Plex feature that allows us to skip intros, similar to Netflix. Itâs a nice idea, but the 
is that they launched with the feature enabled. It basically meant this was a time bomb waiting to happen. My server started blowing up overnight immediately after that.
The tldr for the fix (if you donât want to read that linked article above) is to turn off Generate intro video markers in Settings > Library in your player.
For me, this is good enough. I donât really have a desire to skip intros. And the fact that this feature bombs your server if it encounters an error is enough for me to just turn it off entirely. Even if I âfixedâ or deleted my problem files, there is no guarantee the feature, as-is, wonât crash my server with future files.
Because of this, my advice to most users is to just keep this setting turned off. Itâs insane to suggest to someone importing a whole TV series to have to go through every single episode and check it to make sure itâs not going to cause this error and crash your server.
Sadly, all this fretting and hair-pulling is due to two avoidable issues:
- This feature should have launched as disabled. That way when people enable it and their server starts crashing they have immediate call-back as to what they changed recently to get to the source of the problem.
- Encountering an error like this during a maintenance task (automatic or not) should never bubble up to crashing the server. Ideally it would encounter a problem file, note the error and continue on with its task. At worst it should only kill the task. Good UX would add an alert to your Plex player telling you to look into the problem files, how to fix them and how to prep future files so that this task can run properly.
Cheers 
tk007b
2 Likes
Hi agent , glad my post helped out.
You are spot on with everything you have said. The ârogueâ files I had in my library were there for years but older PMS versions never warned/complained about them but never crashed either. Luckily I got hold of a really helpful Plex employee, BigWheel, that identified the problem files very quickly.
It would have been great if PMS could have identified these files without crashing but I guess you live and learn. Fortunately, I have not had any issues since but more importantly know about the setting you mention and how to spot the dodgy files.
Really pleased, it helped you out 
Stay Safe
TK
Just an update, it has been 2 weeks since this fix and I have not had a single crash. 
1 Like
Youâll be fine now - glad youâre sorted.
As an aside ⊠do you have your data backed up ?, I lost a data disk yesterday. It was 8 years old. Fortunately, all the non-downloadable data was backed up but I think I will replace disks every 5 years from now on âŠ
I have a Drobo. So as space fills up, or if a drive fails, itâs easy enough to swap in a new drive. While the Drobo is redundantly backed-up within itself, I do not have a proper backup scheme. I need to figure this out because while a drive failure is remedied pretty easily, dealing with a failure in the Drobo would not be so much. At this point, cloud backup would take a long, long time. Local backup is a matter of the wallet.
Wow, Iâve checked out the Drobo, it looks pretty neat
Your dead right about cloud storage, thatâs a waste of time. When I joined up with one I had real issues with file size limits and speed of upload / download limits after a certain amount, presumably to put off people like us.
Had a good day today and managed to get my old disk back online, so copying off everything ⊠slowly !
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