Possible bug in PMS API

Dev Community Dev/API Corner
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1

Since the latest releases the Web-API seems to be broken.

I’m using the API calls you can find on https://developer.plex.tv/ to walk through libraries and export some data.

My scripts were running unmodified since years. Now with the latest PMS releases, walking through the libraries and its data wakes up the disks and pools, and slowly reads small amounts of data from them.

This was not the case in previous releases.

Scripts that usually run for seconds now run for nearly an hour.

To make it clear: My scripts don’t access the disks or modify data. It’s within the API calls I use to read data.

Some of the calls I’m doing (just to show some examples):

data = getUrl("/library/sections/{library_key}/all")        
data = getUrl(f"/library/metadata/{ratingkey}")
data = getUrl(key):
...
def getUrl(url, base_url=plex_url):
    r = None

    if url:
        r = requests.get(f"{base_url}{url}", headers=plex_headers)

    return r

Currently I’m rebuilding all my scripts to use the Plex database because the Web-API is terribly slow.

2

Please provide server logs for the time period where you’ve executed these scripts.

3

Thanks for your fast reply. I just did start one of the scripts and my disks and pools slowly spin up with little reads.

The only Log that shows activity when the script is running is “Plex Media Scanner Analysis.log”. The Log starts to fill whenever my script starts. There are lot’s of WARN, INFO, ERROR messages with ffmpeg. Is it possible that the Web-API triggers a start of the Analysis? I’m pretty sure that I do not start something in my scripts.

There’s nothing else running on Plex currently. I will try to upload Logs. Never done that before - so I will look what I can do.

Here’ are my first findings:

Fri May 22 10:39:56 CEST 2026
root@Tower: python3 Test.py

At some point the analyze pops in:

-rw-r--r-- 1 nobody users      793 May 22 10:46 Plex\ Media\ Scanner\ Analysis.1.log
-rw-r--r-- 1 nobody users     1059 May 22 10:46 Plex\ Media\ Scanner\ Analysis.2.log
-rw-r--r-- 1 nobody users     1058 May 22 10:46 Plex\ Media\ Scanner\ Analysis.3.log
-rw-r--r-- 1 nobody users      529 May 22 10:46 Plex\ Media\ Scanner\ Analysis.4.log
-rw-r--r-- 1 nobody users     2118 May 22 10:46 Plex\ Media\ Scanner\ Analysis.5.log
-rw-r--r-- 1 nobody users      528 May 22 10:46 Plex\ Media\ Scanner\ Analysis.log

Seems that tool crashes and starts a new log or whatever.