Server Version#:4.147.1
Player Version#:
<If providing server logs please do NOT turn on verbose logging, only debug logging should be enabled>
I am running PMS on an M1 Mac, with ethernet connection to a Synolgy Nas where my media is stored. Once every couple of days, my server crashes and I have to manually restart it. I have looked at my logs until my eyes bleed and can’t find anything that would point me in a direction that would help…I honestly don’t know exactly what I am looking for, but would love some assistance in figuring this out. Is there a definitive guide to how to troubleshoot? ChatGPT has tried, but it just keep going in circles. Any ideas on what I could try? Thank you!!
Quit out of PMS, open a terminal, and start PMS from the command line after which you will not get a command prompt because the server is running. This is expected.
What you will often get after a crash is an error message pointing you to what caused it, followed by a command prompt. If that happens, screen shot the error message and grab your logs.
For most installs, PMS is dropped into /Applications in which case your command to start the server is exactly this including quotation marks:
"/Applications/Plex Media Server.app/Contents/MacOS/Plex Media Server"
While you’re waiting for that, give us some more background info like
macOS version
PMS version (current stable is v1.42.2.10156)
when the crashes started approximately (month & year?)
whether your NAS shares out directories over SMB or NFS
whether your previous logs you already looked at had “corrupt” or “malformed”
whether PMS is creating DB backups every 3 days as expected
what DNS servers you’re using
whether the Mac has a static IP address
any remote access or firewall enabled?
approximate time of day of the crashes and whether user activity was occurring contemporaneously, or whether it could have been during scheduled tasks.
Anything else you think is germane (lack of ups, power spikes, Hasan)
Yes you would leave running the Terminal app in which you started PMS from the command line, where you should have a cursor simply blinking without seeing the usual command prompt. Then you wait for it to crash and hopefully see some error message printed there.
Followups to your answers:
Tahoe 26.0.1 is bound to have bugs, but seeing as the problem started long before it was released, let’s not focus on it.
SMB shares have been causing issues with PMS on a Mac during the time period you’ve been having issues. Have you been following those issues here on the forums? Again these do not tightly correlate to your crashes every few days, though.
Are you using the common solution of a modified smb.conf file?
Switching from ISP supplied DNS servers to public DNS servers is a standard way of making PMS more stable, but I wouldn’t go as far as to say it avoids crashes like yours. More often if fixes servers not being reachable. Plex gives people a list of better ones to use in the support article section on DNS Rebinding (I use the two from Cloudflare, 1.1.1.1, and 1.0.0.1)
It’s good you don’t have log messages about a corrupt database.
Let’s hope something obvious shows up on the terminal or in the logs you download shortly thereafter.
Mine is not checked at the moment, but if yours is, then we might be able to reach out to someone who can look at your crash report internally and make a suggestion.
In the meantime, yes please grab your logs and drop the zip into your reply. Settings → Troubleshooting → Download Logs
Those two things, the uploaded crash report and you system logs are the standard ways of debugging.
There’s also a chance we could get a bit more information from a third method, the Mac’s log system. Go into the Mac Launchpad → Other → Console and click in the left hand sidebar the Crash Reports then I guess in the right click Plex Media Server if there is one.
Appearing at the bottom of the screen should be the details, but I’m not sure how to interpret them nor if copy/pasting them into a code block here is safe. I wouldn’t want to expose your private Plex Token and don’t have an example crash report to check what’s there.
Would you check the crash log for this user please?
We don’t know what is failing.
I’ll try to look at the logs from PMS attached above in the meantime.
@spoonerstreet Do you know the time of day when the crash occurred?
That is SUPER helpful…I removed that file from the folder structure…Hoping it was just getting hung on that particular one. I have been wrestling with this for a while, and would LOVE to have my PMS be stable again! I will keep everyone posted…fingers crossed.
I wanted to follow up on this…I haven’t had any crashes in over a week!
For those that might be searching for an answer, it appears that the media scanner was really struggling with older .WMV files. I had a library with a lot of older family videos on it, and it was crashing when trying to scan those files.
In the Plex Media Server logs, if you go to the very end of the most recent one, and scroll up, you can see what might have been the issue. After the help of the team above (shout out) spotting this became pretty easy, once you know what to look for.
So, a big thank you to the team here…I really appreciate the help.
The message I got on the command prompt was pretty unhelpful to me:
