Transcode and disk space usage

Plex Media Server NAS & Devices
1

Server Version#: 1.40.2.8273 (HW transcode)
Player Version#: Plex Web 4.126.1

Recently my brother played a video via Firefox (Plex Web) and left the video paused for days. Due to that, I noted that whenever I attempt to play a video that need to be transcoded, I get the “out of space” error.

The “out of space” error is due to my configuration where I created 4GB of ramdisk to be used as transcoder temporary directory. Apparently, 4GB of space has been used up. When I checked the folder, there is one large file in the Sessions folder, around 4GB.

So, I did a little experiment. I played a video in Firefox (Plex Web) and after around 1 minute, I clicked the rewind button. I checked the session file and noted that the file size kept increasing. Whenever the playback reaches 1 minute, I clicked the rewind a few times and monitored the file size. It kept increasing. Then I pause the video at 1 minute and monitor the file. It kept increasing.

I checked the buffer indicator shown in the playback line and I noted that it doesn’t get larger, meaning, it’s not generating more buffer for the client.
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With the playback paused, the session file kept increasing.
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Here’s the log file for the actions described above. The session file is still small, not the 4GB one as it will take quite some time to make it 4GB. I believe the technical team can easily reproduce this behaviour?
Plex Media Server Logs_2024-03-27_10-54-58.zip (1.2 MB)

Is the transcoder causing memory leak somewhere? I see 2 problems.

  1. The session file is not cleared whenever I rewind the playback. It’s ok not to be cleared if the file is used as cache, but from the buffer indicator in the playback line, it got reset when I clicked the rewind button a few time. However the session file still increase in size
  2. The session file increased in size when the playback is paused and the player is not receiving more buffer?

Any help? If this is by design, then I’ll have to change my set up by removing the ramdisk and use the hdd. I am hoping to reduce the hdd usage and use the RAM since I have some free RAM. However, from the little experiment I did, if a video is paused for days, it may keep increasing the session file infinitely, and may cause system failure due to insufficient HDD space?

2

What is configured in Settings → Network → Terminate Sessions Paused for Longer Than?

That should terminate a paused stream after the configured amount of minutes.

Just curious, but why? The disks are already spinning for Plex to read the media, write to log files, update the database, etc. Any power savings would be minimal.

3

I use ramdisks for transcode directories on my servers but with way more memory. The long standing recommendation has been to have a transcode directory that is at least the size of the content you are playing.

While I don’t know that it still needs to be that big (I had no issues in the past playing back 60 GB movies with a 32 GB transcode directory) I wouldn’t try that with 4 GB of memory.

4

Will check on this. Didn’t know it existed.

5

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