Server Version#: 1.16.0.1226 (Linux Mint 19.1)
Player Version#: PS 3 client, v3 01.41 and Plex for LG vLG 65UH6030-UC
Tonight, I just got done adding a friend to my PMS and while in my basement, I noticed my server fans were going full tilt for about 15 minutes solid. Even with multiple people streaming from me, the fans don’t run at full speed non-stop.
I logged into the box and noticed that 6 of my 8 cores were at 100% (i7-7700K) and only 2 people are streaming from me. I’ve been working on my server before with 6 people streaming and the CPU load was not that high. I’m not sure if a server update is responsible or my newly added friend with his PS3.
Looking in htop, the processes that are pegging my cores are Plex. Log files attached. (The only 2 things that have changed recently is me adding my friend with his PS3 and a couple of weeks ago, I updated the PMS version.
Both my friends disconnected from my server and Plex CPU usage was still maxing out those 6 cores. Attaching log files with nobody streaming. I let it sit for a bit and even with nobody accessing the server, and it not appearing to be doing anything, I had to bounce it because I wasn’t able to stop the PMS process.
Your logs show that a playback session was active right until the end. (an LG WebOS-TV). So you can’t say that your server had no load on it.
And right before that, a ‘tv shows’ library was also updated.
There were at least 3 playback sessions: 1 PS3, a LG TV, and a Roku
And it appears that you started a photo library scan half an hour before you fetched the logs. Depending on the number of items in this library, this can cause considerable load on the server. IF there were any new items in it, that is.
It also appears that you are allowing your users to Sync media to their phones. If a user has a Sync job activated, this will also cause cpu load while new items are being prepared for the sync.
The LG needed transcoding because it wouldn’t accept H.264-Level 4.1 video stream and there is a bandwidth limit, which also caused the audio to get transcoded
The Roku also needed transcoding, because the Plex Client on the Roku doesn’t support AVI/mpeg4 files.
If you’re referring to my 2nd post, when those logs were captured, there was nobody actively streaming from me. Maybe I captured them too quickly and Plex was holding the connection open to the LG streamer for some reason?!
I really think this is the main reason for my CPU cores being maxed out. Other Plex support people have mentioned this before when looking at previous log files when I asked about heavy CPU usage… that Plex was busy indexing my picture folder.
I do have thousands upon thousands of digital pictures. Every night, at 10pm, rsync fires off via a cron job and looks for changes on my main RAID array and copies news files to my backup array.
But the odd thing is, while I have thousands of digital pics, they are static. I haven’t added anything new to the pile in a LONG time. The only thing I can think of is rsync may be doing SOMETHING to the pictures and Plex sees them as new, every night, and spends CPU cycles indexing them. I think I’m just going to have to remove my photo library from Plex. But this brings up another observation point. You said the logs showed a ‘TV Shows’ library being updated. I’m wondering if every, single night after rsync does it’s thing at 10pm, if Plex is seeing all my libraries as ‘new’ and starts re-indexing all my media?!?
As for allowing folks to sync media. I think I only have that option turned on for 1 person (and myself). And neither of us were doing any syncing at that time last night.
I really think rsync is triggering Plex to do a library update every night.
