Server Version#: 1.25.4.5468
Player Version#: various, probably not relevant
Briefly, Plex server has been running fine in anger (not experimental) for 3 plus years.
It’s running on 18.04 ubuntu on an Intel based m/c with a 1TB disk using LVM and 3 “partitions” therein mapped to /, /home & /swap. OS is kept up to date every 4-6 months. Plex probably every couple of months. I don’t go for all releases but I try to keep it reasonably current.
Media files reside on a XigmaNAS box. I use for photos music and video. Music and Photos are pretty static, Videos are added 2 or 3 times a week in batches and removed occasionally.
Currently approx. 13TB video; 1TB Photos; .5TB Music in 12,700; 73,100; 42,000 files respectively
No issues at all until recently.
Updated to this release about 3 weeks ago, initially OK, but huge server activity as it downloaded the new metadata, took several days to complete judging by the fan activity on the server. Haven’t seen any significant difference in info available on screens subsequently, so I hope there’s some advantage to be seen in future.
Then started experiencing what I thought initially was buffering caused by wifi issues on one Samsung TV. Then the web client started to barf and tell me not enough space to convert.
…so followed relevant threads I could find but nothing quite the same. In the process I found that the root partition (/) was at 99% - clearly not good - but even following all the usual ubuntu cleans of kernels, cache etc. I was only able to get this down to 88%.
I had a 20GB root partition so in the short term using LVM I extended this to 37G so that I had something to play with and Plex could carry on filling things up (if it is Plex)
I found that /var is the main disk usage and is sitting at 13GB. the vast majority of which as I was watching the scanning processes seems to reside in thousands of files under
/var/lib/plexmediaserver/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Media/localhost…
(or a very close variant thereof).
Transcoding path is default. I thought I’d switched off transcoding because we mainly use on TVs so I expect the TV’s to do a better job at transcoding than Plex and want them to receive the original material. One other thing I discovered rootling through a couple of the logs (which I don’t really understand) is that transcoding seems to happen anyway, especially on audio and it seems sometimes to get the client config wrong and reduce the audio to a lower level. (but that’s another problem for another day and another thread)
Thing is I don’t know if
- this is the amount of files that should be there and I just didn’t give it all enough space or
- whether something has gone wrong and left a heap of temporary files and it’s fine now or
- whether it’s still going wrong.
What would be really helpful is pointers to diagnose the space issue a bit more, and an explanation of what I should expect and if it needs it, suggested changes to ensure it stays working fine.
…Oh, I did add a Tidal subscription before Christmas but that’s not panning out to be particulalry useful as it’s limited to my user ID only so it’s not really being used through Plex and will get binned pretty soon I think, but it may have relevance to space.
