PMS crashes once a day; unavailable from clients and "503 Service Unavailable" on web interface

Plex Media Server Desktops & Laptops
2

The issue that you are having is called a “deadlock”. Myself and others have this problem and have been working with a Plex employee (sa2000) in this thread: Plex Server Crashing Randomly - #106 by changelin

Here are the steps to get the data Plex employees need:

Diagnostics for a deadlock / lockout (Windows)

  1. Prepare yourself by finding the server security token string as it will be needed for the connections list request. To find the token string, see this support article Finding an authentication token / X-Plex-Token | Plex Support
  2. When the problem occurs (and please wait for sufficient time before capturing diagnostics or restarting eg 10 minutes of requests to the server not getting through) , get the output from a specific browser request on the server. In a browser, go to this url http://localhost:32400/connections?X-Plex-Token=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx where you put the server token string instead of the xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx. Copy the displayed output to a text file and save
  3. Next is to force a process dump for the Plex Media Server.exe process. We can do this with Windows Task Manager - but on a 64-bit windows and with Plex Media Server.exe being a 32-bit application, you would need to load the 32-bit x86 version of windows task manager. So load this program instead of the default task manager C:\Windows\SysWow64\Taskmgr.exe
  4. Using this 32-bit Taskmgr.exe find the Plex Media Server.exe process, select it and right click on it and choose Create Dump
  5. Check that the dmp file has been created
  6. Restart the server and capture the zipped logs
  7. Zip the dmp files and upload to dropbox or similar service
  8. Send to @sa2000 by private message link to the zipped dmp files and send the saved /connections output text files and the zipped logs

Feel free to PM me if you need any help with the diagnostic steps. Logs alone will not fix this, we need to provide all of the info outlined above to Plex for them to properly diagnose it.