PMS stopped honoring temporary directory setting. Now uses /tmp

Plex Media Server
50

We only got this report just as well, I’m building a test case up, requires video files, at least playing audio files does not lead to any tmp files being created. Conversion to RAW seems to be what is creating the large ones.

… probably indeed due to skip intro feature, something I cannot test due to missing Plex pass for now :wink:. Thanks for the hint!

Found Lots of traffic in /tmp on intro detection - #3 by ChuckPa, jep that’s it.

Went through the thread and see it has been closed. But I have to say the discussion opposition has a fair point that the current situation where intro detection writes such amount of data by default to /tmp creates real issues. See: Image update | Odroid XU3/XU4/MC1/HC1/HC2 · Issue #3544 · MichaIng/DietPi · GitHub
On the new GitHub issue one can see that disabling intro detection solved the issue of > 1 GiB PMS data written to /tmp, default TMPDIR and by default tmpfs with again default 512 MiB size on all Linux distros I know. Of course one can increase it, on our little overlay distro it has 1 GiB by default but more stresses a swap file on most SBCs, hence often leads to SD card wear that way. Using a well defined directory, respecting a setting dedicated to TMPDIR instead (like it is for regular transcoding), allows one to have that data created e.g. on an external drive so that neither GiBs of RAM is blocked nor the SD card is worn. Otherwise the feature IMO should be disabled by default with a strong warning that it requires a certain (unusual) large amount of RAM in certain circumstances. I just have this one report of 1 GiB, but don’t know much much media was processed and how much data would have been written if /tmp wouldn’t gotten full.

Read somewhere that the feature will be available for non-pass users as well? Would run some tests then to check more in detail myself.

Little buttom line from my end:

  • The default tmpfs size is 512 MiB and /tmp is a tmpfs usually.
  • That gives a hint about which data size is usually expected to be created there and in which case one should better use a dedicated non tmpfs dir by default, also /var/tmp is an option, which is considered for persistent tmp files, hence not intended to be a tmpfs.
  • I know there is no strict rule about this, but the related issues are present. So IMO its wise to design program defaults a way that no 512 MiB are written to /tmp in usual circumstances with default settings :slightly_smiling_face: .