TrueNAS Plex server suddenly full

Plex Media Server NAS & Devices
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Server Version#: 1.23.4.4712
Player Version#: 1.33.0.2444-a220eae4

My Plex server stopped working tonight. I got a system alert email from TrueNAS about four hours ago saying my Plex dataset was 93% full - I didn’t see this email until about half an hour ago, at which point the dataset had become 100% full and Plex had stopped running.

My NAS has 6TB of usable space in the main pool (4x 3TB HDDs in two mirrors): about 4GB of this is TV and movies and there’s about 750GB free. There’s a second pool (215GB usable space) made up of two 250GB SSDs in mirror which is only used by Plex for its data: it’s mounted at /usr/local/plexdata-plexpass in the Plex jail, with the jail itself running from the main HDD volume.

I think that the SSD volume may have mostly filled up this evening: I don’t check it very often, but the last time I did, I think it was less than half full. Additionally, since I’ve been getting alerts from TrueNAS about the main volume being 80% full for over a year (I know I’m supposed to make or add more space: it’s on my to-do list and I’m keeping an eye on it for now), I think that if the SSD had been filling up slowly, I’d have seen an alert before tonight. Not to mention that it went from 93% full to 100% full in no more than a couple of hours).

I got Plex to start up by clearing out some older files in Cache/PhotoTranscoder as suggested in this Reddit post, then I disabled and deleted all of the video thumbnails in my TV and film libraries, and then I emptied trash from both of them. This appears to have freed up about 50GB from the plexdata-plexpass/Plex Media Server/Media folder, but the Metadata folder is unchanged at 150GB.

Questions:

  1. Is 150GB of metadata about right for my 4TB of TV (about 4000 episodes) and film (about 350 films) or is that larger than expected? I need to know if I need to expand the pool or if this is an anomaly and my existing 215GB pool should really be enough for now.

  2. Is there a quick way to see if Plex generated enough data quickly enough this evening to have filled my drives?

  3. Since emptying trash didn’t seem to free up much space, is there another way to clean out the metadata folder?

Thanks in advance.

2

FWIW, I’ve ~2000 movies & ~500 TV show episodes. The data folder on my system is ~80GB (Plex runs on a Synology NAS, but that will not matter).

Any sync jobs?

See this support document:
https://support.plex.tv/articles/202529153-why-is-my-plex-media-server-directory-so-large/

3

No sync jobs, though I did download some vids to my laptop a couple of weeks ago (and then deleted them again a few days later).

4

I just used the Optimise Database and Clean Bundles options in Settings - Troubleshooting and the combination brought my metadata folder down from 148GB to 7.2GB. I think it was mostly the bundles at fault, which would be ironic given that most of the time Plex fails to download posters and thumbnails, so I’d have thought that there wouldn’t have been all that many of them to delete anyway. I’m down to 6% usage of the pool instead of 100%.

Fingers crossed that Plex hasn’t just messed up all of the thumbnails that were set before that cleanup. Although, to be fair, it screws them up on a regular basis anyway and I keep having to reset them by hand.

5

Check Settings → Scheduled Tasks. Make sure you have those tasks and backing up your database scheduled selected.

6

Already set, and have been for a long time. DB backups look OK, but cleanup clearly isn’t doing much.

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