I’m curious with seeing everyone adding votes for ebooks, comics, and soon podcasts, well, is Plex really up to the challenge to maintain a large amount of media in case we bring that to you? I ask because I’ve already have 100,000 tracks in music, 3,000 movies and ? in tv shows, I’d throw in my hand in the ring for eBooks but honestly Calibre does an already great job… my metadata and plex folder is already tearing up 75GB out of 250GB in an internal SSD. Has anyone really packed in so much data that Plex can really handle it all? I guess the take away here is finding a balance of keeping it lean and mean. I count my blessings but there are a few days when I open Plex and it takes about 2 min for the Server to load, I think of iTunes and how bloated it can be. And to think too, Plex has 100 or less employees and iTunes/Apple has like 1,000 and they still can’t get things right either.
There are some users who have these amounts. @cayars
With a bit of clever planning, this is working just fine.
Since Plex is a server it should be running 24/7 anyway.
Otherwise it may have never the chance to do its ‘housecleaning’.
https://support.plex.tv/articles/202197488-scheduled-server-maintenance/
@OttoKerner said:
Since Plex is a server it should be running 24/7 anyway.
Otherwise it may have never the chance to do its ‘housecleaning’.
https://support.plex.tv/articles/202197488-scheduled-server-maintenance/
The last time mine was off and cold was during an 8 hour power outage - last summer. It was off and cold one other time - the day it came out of the packing peanuts.
Scheduled maintenance happens when the cover comes off, the air can goes in, dust starts flying - then the cover goes back on - usually that happens during a Handbrake Job.
Servers are meant to be ‘in service’.
Otherwise it’s just a cold box not doing anything.
I noticed that Plex has got slower over the years. The more I add the slower Plex gets. There might be a point where Plex will not load my OnDeck anymore. I remember how fast going from the Hub to an OnDeck item and back to the hub was. So, the default “timeouts” will need to change to accommodate increasingly larger libraries But I imagine it’s not all on the server. The client has much to do with it as well. And my Roku3 is getting up there in years.
@JR86 said:
I’m curious with seeing everyone adding votes for ebooks, comics, and soon podcasts, well, is Plex really up to the challenge to maintain a large amount of media in case we bring that to you? I ask because I’ve already have 100,000 tracks in music, 3,000 movies and ? in tv shows, I’d throw in my hand in the ring for eBooks but honestly Calibre does an already great job… my metadata and plex folder is already tearing up 75GB out of 250GB in an internal SSD. Has anyone really packed in so much data that Plex can really handle it all? I guess the take away here is finding a balance of keeping it lean and mean. I count my blessings but there are a few days when I open Plex and it takes about 2 min for the Server to load, I think of iTunes and how bloated it can be. And to think too, Plex has 100 or less employees and iTunes/Apple has like 1,000 and they still can’t get things right either.
As Otto mentioned there are a few people with pretty large libraries. My system is up there in size of files managed and it’s still going very well. You can get an idea by looking at my sig for the amount of files I’ve got.
I run this on a 1st generation i7 @2.8 GHz.with AMD GPU used for transcoding when needed. You mentioned your meta data directory is about 75 GB and mine is over 890 GB so Plex can and does work with large meta directories and you have a lot more “growth” you can do. 
I have two 1 TB SSD drives used in this computer where the meta-data is stored as well as the OS and DVR recordings are done.
My system was starting to feel slow when I was at about 400 GB of meta-data so I went SSD and it became lightning quick after that and still is.
I could of course update the hardware to the latest greatest or use multiple CPUs if needed but I just haven’t had the need. I do pre-process all my video files to H.264 and convert DVR files as well (4K exempt from this) as add AAC files just to make playback easier and allow direct play on every device but that’s besides the point of this thread and Plex’s ability to manage the data.
Also worth knowing is that Plex has a new UI that is still being tweaked that is available on the Xbox and in PMP version 2. This will eventually roll out to all devices. One of the cool things about this new UI is that it’s content first, not server first. Put in lay-man terms you don’t have to select the server to access the libraries on that server. The new UI gives you access to all libraries on all servers you have access to.
So moving forward you could divide your system up and run literally one library per Plex Server but in the UI you would get the full list from all your servers and it would just appear as one big server.
So rest assured using Plex there isn’t a “brick wall” that you will eventually hit limiting your system size.
Carlo
Thank you for your responses. I’m on the Plex Reddit forums as well and I come across guys who have such awesome setups with beast cpu’s and TB’s of storage. I became slightly worried when I have to do my monthly plex folder backups. The question of how far can we go was often on my mind and your example of yourself have proven me wrong so THANK YOU. I apparently have nothing to worry about. I’ll keep building my castle of endless media.
@JR86 said:
Thank you for your responses. I’m on the Plex Reddit forums as well and I come across guys who have such awesome setups with beast cpu’s and TB’s of storage. I became slightly worried when I have to do my monthly plex folder backups. The question of how far can we go was often on my mind and your example of yourself have proven me wrong so THANK YOU. I apparently have nothing to worry about. I’ll keep building my castle of endless media.
The only thing i have noticed with PLEX and possible slow ups are with Smart TV PLEX apps. If you dump all your movies in one library it can slow up. Rest assured it still works. But with plex you can have many Libraries to catalog your collection. The later model Smart TV’s have more Ram and faster processors and slow ups are rare. Just keep your storage drives healthy and your Plex experience should be grand.
@cayars said:
You mentioned your meta data directory is about 75 GB and mine is over 890 GB
Sounds like you may be experiencing the same issue a few others are. Abnormally large metadata size.
Extremely many files in plexdata! & Too Many Movie Posters
@NewPlaza said:
Sounds like you may be experiencing the same issue a few others are. Abnormally large metadata size.
Extremely many files in plexdata! & Too Many Movie Posters
@cayars said:
You mentioned your meta data directory is about 75 GB and mine is over 890 GB
My data directory is about 500GB. I run it on a local HDD.
I have 21 Movie Libraries, 4 TV Show Libraries, 3 Music Libraries and an Other Videos Library spread across 6 HDDs - 4 locals and 2 shares.
Access is, for all intents and purposes - instantaneous.
If there’s a wall out there somewhere I can’t even see it.
@NewPlaza said:
@cayars said:
You mentioned your meta data directory is about 75 GB and mine is over 890 GBSounds like you may be experiencing the same issue a few others are. Abnormally large metadata size.
Extremely many files in plexdata! & Too Many Movie Posters
The largest portion of my meta-data size is from the BIF files (roku index) so large size would be expected. The bif files are used in many clients and in NOW PLAYING to show you what’s happening at that point in the movie/show/video and useful when FF or RW. I certainly don’t require them but they are nice to have.
I’ve modded my system so that the bif files aren’t stored in my typical meta-data directories but instead sit side by side with the media. I did this by creating a set of scripts that run against the database to pull the info, then move the Plex generated files from the meta-data directory to the same local as the media, creates a symlink back, etc
Again, not needed but it frees up a huge amount of space on the SSDs this way. I personally didn’t want all the bif files using up valuable SSD space. Since I run both Plex and Emby I use the same bif files in both systems with the same type of trick so that saves a lot of additional space.
Carlo
You all are talking about small time data, I have a actually server with 4 CPU’s 148 gigs of ram and 12 hard drive totaling at 34tb with over 20,000 music files , over 10,000 movies and tv shows, 200,000 pictures… it seems to work fine if it is run from a phone or tablet, but when I use it from a tv (mind you a couple of them are older) it seems like it takes forever to load anything… when it does finally load, the movie buffers the entire time its playing… any thoughts on how to fix it??
I’m sitting on a dual processor setup, with 100TB and looking at adding more Hard-drives to it. The problem you are having with your TV’s are not your server’s problem, as much as the TV apps having issues. I have 2 Smart TV’s that have the Plex app on them. The problem, with TV apps/ Smart TV’s, is after some time, they are no longer updated/supported, and the TV’s only give their Apps a limited amount of Cache Memory. Plex from my experience, uses Cache as if it was limitless. Best bet for your TV’s is to invest in a Roku, or Fire TV, for like 25 bucks, problem fixed.
Rinion80 is right. I am running a server with a Xenon 8core 3.7GHz 16GB RAM. Plex library up to about 35TB on board a 12 bay server chasis, but I also have some content mounted from a NAS box feeding into it so it is a lot more in reality. The only playback device that lags is my vizio TV. PS4 & rouku on other tv’s work perfect. SSD as your OS hard drive (where the metadata lives) also makes a HUGE difference… And on another note, Iv’e streamed to family from GA,SC, MD,NY,MA at times all simultaneously. I’ve noticed with even as many as 6 people at the same time ( most of them transcoding), RAM didn’t really matter much. Its all processing. CPU usage hits the roof while ram is at 30-40% tops…
plex (server) is based on sqlite3 database and a filesystem based metadata storage system.
the limits for the database @ https://www.sqlite.org/limits.html
the limits for the filesystem are of course according to the size, speed, and file system limits of the plex data drive.
my plex database is approx ~1 gig. I haven’t checked my metadata folders size lately, but that will depend as explained in the thread depending what you have configured for chapter or video thumbnails.
in summary, the only practical limits to plex is the speed of your plex data drive (very IO sensitive), the cpu power (for transcoding and basic operations), sufficient memory for OS/application processes and caching, and GPU if you want hardware accelerated transcoding.
Larger your library, the larger the database and metadata systems will become, and the more important that disk IO and caching become.
And to be clear, it is IO latency that is more important than actual throughput (reading tons of small metadata files, and low latency database read/write IO).
So, I’m one of those guys you’re speaking of. To put it bluntly, I have over 25k movies in my Radarr Database. I use a SeedBox to handle all the downloading, metadata collection, etc.. Thus why you see only a handful of movies actually added. This isn’t all the movies either, I’m missing about another 10k or so. I host mine on Google’s G Suite, I’m pushing north of 350TB of space used, now this isn’t everything. I have servers in my storage unit that have data I need to upload, but currently in a crappy situation.
Before I moved, and took the job I’m at now, I was pushing 2x servers + 4x Storage Servers + 4 JBODs. Total capacity was north of 400TB of raw space.
The only time plex was sluggish or had problems, was when I had more than 20 concurrent users streaming 1080p - 4K.
Meta Data is well over 2TB
