I have a pretty big library, and I have some of my libraries broken down into segments (“variety” for late night/SNL type stuff, kids TV for kids shows, and another for everything else, and a similar spli for music concerts, separated from kids movies separated from other movies, and audiobooks separated from music).
In spite of this separation, each library is still as small as 500GB and as large as 5TB. Running a scan on 5TB can be pretty slow and arduous just to add an individual 800MB file, which is usually in its own folder (or a folder with fewer than 150 files, for things like The Daily Show), not to mention can be a real drag on the CPU.
While I do have the trigger for Plex to monitor fr small changes, when I force a scan of a library, it goes through everything.
I’d like to be able to home in on a folder and tell Plex to refresh that folder alone.
For all my hunting, I don’t think I’ve been able to find a way to do this, so I’d hope we can have it added.
My movies library alone is 17GB, almost 1600 entries and currently spread across four hard drives. It takes less than a minute to scan when I trigger a full scan. I’d see if you can post in the Windows Server section for some sweet ninja help.
The only reason that I could think a scan would take a long time and grind up the CPU is if you have few matches in your library. Then when Plex scans it will try to match each unmatched it finds. That could tie it up for awhile.
The scanner first checks if a folder has been modified and will only scan within that folder if it has, otherwise it will skip it and move on. So if your files are organized properly into folders, it shouldn’t see any changes to the libraries you didn’t touch, and these should fly right by. If you can see a noticeable delay in the scan when you haven’t changed anything, then there could be a problem. You’ll need to run the scan, then provide me the PMS log. Then if you can scan again and provide me a 2nd set of logs. The first set may have detected some changes and be slow, but the 2nd should see no changes and go really quick.
