Should PMS slowly, continuously increase its memory usage in Linux?

Plex Media Server Desktops & Laptops
1

Server Version#: 1.17.0.1841
Player Version#: PlexWeb 4.8.3, also Roku and other clients.

I’m not actually sure this is a problem, I’m mainly trying to understand if this is normal behavior. I run PMS on a Linux box, basically an Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS with nothing else on it. As I play videos, over time PMS slowly but consistently increases its memory usage. Here’s current status with PMS idle:

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As you can see, at the moment this server has 12GB on board so it has plenty of memory to work with. DLNA is disabled.

Full disclosure: The server was recently upgraded from 4GB; Plex regularly was peaking at 3+ GB usage, at which point Plex clients would randomly suffer from slowdowns in loading information, and the whole server would eventually crash. The RAM was part of the troubleshooting. I haven’t had crashes since the upgrade to 12 GB, but that may be purely coincidence. PMS has never reached 11+ GB memory usage threshold because the PMS service is eventually restarted due to an update, and the climb starts again.

I have PMS on Windows and it’s using about 71MB at the moment while idle, but of course that may handle memory differently.

Is this behavior the norm for PMS on Linux?

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Unless swap goes to zero then all is fine. Linux will use free mem space as file cache, with 4GB it is entirely possible to get a slight pause as it switches to doing cleanup while playing a video file.

Other linux character based monitoring utils, htop, atop

Some useful commands

$ free -m
$ vmstat

Notice how they say cached and buffered.

Chuck’s script to track memory consumption of PMS.

#!/bin/sh
while sleep 10s
do
now=$(date +"%D %T")
mem=$(ps -p $(pidof "Plex Media Server") -o drs=)
echo $now "," $mem  >> mem_snapshots.log
done
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Sorry to double post but found the thread where they went into memory analysis.

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