Searching problems

Plex Media Server
1

I think there’s something newly broken with indexing, and search.

I don’t know if it’s related, but since the past few server updates searching for anything in my local media library comes up empty (and that’s a Plex server running on MacOS, searching with any mobile client or web interface.)

2

I’m moving this into a separate thread as it’s not related.
Just double-checked on my own server and I cannot reproduce this behavior… would you mind sharing some details on what you search that’s no longer coming up?

3

Broken search can be a damaged index. The last update brought a massive change in this very field.
I’d say look out for reports of database damage in your server log:

  1. activate debug logging (not ‘verbose’!)
  2. quit Plex Server
  3. wait 1 minute
  4. start Plex Server
  5. wait 5 minutes
  6. fetch log files and attach them here

Or inspect them yourself. Take a look at the Plex Media Server.log file and seek for messages about database corrupt or malformed.
If you find these, you may have to repair your database.

1 Like
4

(Useful to know that there were recent changes to indexing. I didn’t particularly remember seeing anything in the release notes, except I did know that there have also been some changes related to seeing Plex pass content in Apple TV - and I run an Apple TV client and I have a Plex pass.)

There’s nothing showing corrupt or malformed, but… it did occur to me, when looking through what else was logged, that I think it was recently I switched to the “Plex Movie” database (would I have had “Plex Movie Legacy” before, if I set up some time ago?), after moving some of my library around between disks and realising I was getting very strange title matches against old films. However, I am still using “TheTVDB” for TV series, with Plex Series Scanner, and they’re not showing up in search results either.

I’ll read through some of the steps about checking the database integrity, in the “Repair a Corrupt Database” doc that you linked to, and see if anything shows up in the current and various upgrade backup versions. (I’ve just found the thread which discusses the new icu_root collation - Hoping for help with DB Corruption)

5

Well, that’s interesting. DROPping the index_title_sort_icu index and letting Plex recreate it on start-up has brought the local search results back.

That makes sense. Hopefully that’ll be a useful data point for someone.

1 Like
6

This is the new index which was being created for the better search support. It is a rather extensive operation and if it’s for some reason interrupted, you’ll end up with an un-usable search index.

7

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