First off, I do not believe this is a duplicate of the following topic, the titel match but the content seem to be about something else:
Second, this has been discussed before, but seems to still be an issue:
Now, every time we click an item it get reprocessed and it takes a few seconds and has other impacts. The reason for this seems to be the Local Asset Agent or at least to do with the folder with all video files having a “Modified Date” later than that of the item you are trying to view.
This however causes other issues down the chain, some reports clients freezing, myself using an Nvidia Shield (2017) gets to wait a few seconds and then when clicking back to the Library get returned to the top instead of where I was previous standing.
Once the item has been updated it works (fast and clicking back returns to the correct place in Library) for a few days but then (when adding a new video file and the “Modified Date” changes) we are back to square one.
The reason seems to be that Local Asset Agent/something else wants to scan the entire folder for extras/subtitles/other changes every time you click an item and a good suggestion made by another user is that this should be performed as a background task (maybe included in the periodic library update) so that everything is ready to be played when the user wants to play a movie.
Yes, that’s a solution although I would rather consider that a workaround since this can be solved much more efficient with a scheduled task or maybe smart/pattern (more restricted) lookup of possible addition/modification/removal of files.
Yes and it was activated, what consequences would it have to disable it?
I add movies maybe once or twice a week, so the modified attribute of the Movies folder will change quite often I’m afraid. Also im running Sub-zero for better subtitles and it happens that it downloads better subtitles for older movies.
I threw together a script to create and move movies into separate folders, so time will tell if it helps. But this is more a matter of maybe finding a better way for Plex to operate/handle this situation since I believe most people just add their video files (for the same library, say movies) straight into the same folder. And since the current way of handling this impacts user experience (slower as the number of files grow and results in unexpected behavior in clients such as Plex for Android TV) it has a negative impact on the Plex brand.
Edit: I did just do some testing and it seems like ext4 doesn’t update modification date of a folder if the same file inside is replaced, only when the directory it self and/or files are added/removed so Sub-zero should not be interfering with its current behavior. And behavior should be as expected when files are added/removed.
I read up on the setting you mentioned and it seems like that should be a solution provided to prevent the issues experienced by people with large number of files in the same folder. Although, that makes me wonder (once again) what triggers the refresh of an item every* time it is accessed?
*Every first time until something changes in the folder.
