I was under the impression that, since what I was asking for were more tools for administrators to use to admin the server I was making a single request with examples of the tools needed by the administrator to do a comprehensive job. That request was locked, and I was told to post each example as a separate request.
Right now, I added 2 new movies to my collection. Plex is maxing out the CPU on my server, and I have no indications of WHY within the web app itself. Systems monitors are telling me it's Plex and give a PID, but that's it. (I KNOW why it's happening, but I should be able to SEE why it's happening with in the web app itself!) Is it making index files, downloading metadata, posters, etc.
I should be able to tell Plex how much CPU to use for making the index files. Don't take all the CPU to do it, unless that's what I have it set up to do. (This is why the CPU is so high above, but come on, this function doesn't need to take 100% of the CPU when it's running!)
Why is the server responding so slowly? What processes are going on that are slowing things down? Does this process need to happen RIGHT NOW? And at full throttle?
Plex should have a place under Settings that gives me options of WHEN to build index files or when to download sub-titles and how much of the system's resources to use during this process. Yes, transcoding the index files might take longer at slower speeds, but at least the server (And other services on the same box) are still available. As it sits now, if you are doing indexes, you are pretty much screwed doing anything else on a mid-level NAS.
On linux a "top" command is quite effective. Metadata might top it, indexing a file will do it for sure. If you don't actively use indexes (AFAIK only Roku really uses them) don't activate it since it really inflates your media library and CPU consumption.
I would agree we need to have more insight as to what PMS is doing. This would help out the novice users to understand why their CPU is running at 99% (usually indexing is enabled) when there are no active stream and would lessen threads like these.
Well....Subject says: "what-is-my-server-up-to", so this would IMHO be an OS issue!
But when said...."What's Plex up to" would be nice, but guess it's not easy, due to the different platforms it runs on
Just saying though....
/T
Fairly certain OP is talking about Plex Server. Not a generic server. So in this case I would say "what-is-my-server-up-to" would be a Plex Issue.
I think in any regard some form of a task manager/viewer inside plex itself would be wonderful. It can be annoying watching things starting to spike and knowing why but not being able to do anything about it.
