Recently, whenever my server scans my libraries, The cpu goes it 100% and clients get “Server is currently unavailable” for a few minutes. I have never had this issue in 8 years of using Plex and can’t find anything in recent posts that make me think this is common.
I have had to turn off auto scanning and just manually scan when nobody is using Plex.
Does anyone have any ideas on what might be going on?
BTW, even if it scans a small library with nothing new in it, the cpu will jump to 100%.
Same issue here over last month or so - plex pass and I only manually scan my folders, and it is happening to me then, taking the library down for minutes at a time.
Have you figured out what is causing this? I’ve been having a lot of issues recently with my server going unavailable. Recently I have noticed it seems closely tied to high CPU. To try to keep CPU usage down, I set my library’s scans to manual. I just manually ran a scan and watched it go unavailable after being fine for a while. Now I’m wondering if all of the issues are tied to times when it was scanning before. When I rolled my iTunes library into Plex it scanned non-stop for a while and I frequently had issues afterwards.
I have not figured it out yet. The only other posts I have seen that reference this issue surround the scanning of audio-books. I do have audio-books and it does it every time, but it also does it with other libraries. I gave up and bought a new server with much more cpu power and ram, and it still tops out at 100% but I have only been disconnected a couple of times. This is obviously not the answer and I am very disappointed that there has been no answer to this to date.
tried it, from your suggestion in another thread. No change
Music libraries are the problem, particularly the new Plex music scanner/agent. It’s relentless in trying to find a match, and if you have albums and.or audio books not available from MusicBrainz, or if your library isn’t structured exactly to specifications, the scanner will stall out or re-scann repetitively.
Yeah, it’s been very frustrating. I just deleted my Music library to see if that helps. I don’t really used it. I wanted Plex to be my single source for media, but find myself still going to Apple Music for music and Overcast for Podcasts. Maybe completely deleting the music library will do the trick. I also have an audiobook library, but I’m using this custom Audiobook scanner: https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/5yv7ge/i_built_a_metadata_agent_for_audiobooks/
I was still getting issues with all libraries set for manual scan though. I manually refreshed a movie library the other day and it still spiked CPU and made Plex unavailable. This was before deleting the Music library. I guess we’ll see if that helped. I wonder if my audiobook library will still be problematic with most of the features turned off and the scanner changed.
Cheers! I will try using that scanner. I didn’t add the music into my new server until last and the spikes were happening anyway. At that point I just gave up trying to find an answer and added them. Like you, it still spikes when I do a manual scan, but it is short and I can choose when to do it so others aren’t disconnected.
Right. Manually scanning feels like an annoyance though. This shouldn’t be an issue and I wonder why it doesn’t seem more widespread. I’m so used to it automatically scanning, so when I add something new, I keep forgetting that I now need to manually trigger a scan. Maybe I will set it to scan once a night or something to avoid that annoyance. If nothing else, completely dropping the music library should make scans quicker since Plex really seems to struggle with scanning and matching each audio file.
