My server keeps hanging up after around 500 albums have been analyzed. I found out it’s because metadata is filling up my main 480GB SSD that my server is installed on.
My question is, will it always take up this space if I want to keep the sonic analysis feature enabled? I could just upload my library in parts if it frees up this space after the analysis is done.
I’d like to keep my metadata on the faster SSD, but would moving it to a larger HDD negatively impact my other video libraries and make browsing for something to watch slower?
Sonic analysis is taking up some space for the tracks which are currently being analysed. (They are decoded to uncompressed wav files) After they are done, those temporary files are being deleted.
The results of the analysis take up only a negligible amount of storage, so that shouldn’t be an issue.
If you are running low on free space on your hard drive, consider moving the path of the transcoder cache
(or the whole Plex data folder)
to a different volume.
You are very right. I read some misleading info somewhere else and I saw my SDD capacity drop a little bit while doing the analysis again. However, I let it keep going and it didn’t get any lower.
Still not sure what has been causing my sonic analysis to hang up if I let it go too long, but this time I put albums back in my music folder in batches. So far I’ve been able to get 900 albums analyzed without issue. Probably not the best solution, but at least I only have to do it once.
EDIT DISREGARD - Doing some digging, it appears this container has been creeping up in size for a while now and Sonic just pushed it over the edge.
Is there some way to get guidance to clear out the temporary files/data? I run my PMS in a smaller LXD container and it filled up my root volume when I tried to enable Sonic Analysis (SA). I’ve disabled the SA process from the library at this point, but all the extra space usage is still there.
I realize I should have taken a snapshot before enabling this feature, but I did not, and I’m hoping to reduce the size of my root volume back closer to it’s previous size.
Are they in $TMPDIR? ls $TMPDIR maybe. Otto mentions above that they might go the system’s general “temp” folder.
Different but maybe related, do your containers return the space when files are deleted?
Depending on your container images and temporary paths and security/isolation settings and storage filesystem details, it might not be automatic, even after files are deleted.
In the past I’ve had to manually zpool trim POOL or zpool set autotrim=on POOL to communicate up that the blocks had been released.
Unfortunately no, there’s no $TMPDIR global variable set for the plex user or service. I’m assuming the system general temp directory would be /tmp or /var/tmp, and there is nothing in either too.
I really do think it’s just been gradually growing and I’ve not noticed until now.
Also I appreciate the note about trim, I hadn’t thought about ZFS properties in a very long time and I had some weird memories from your comment. Anyway, there’s no additional free space, it’s all in the $PMS directory under Media and Metadata.
