I have a problem with my copy of PMS where it will randomly be very slow. This slowness includes:
- returning search results, which can take upwards of 10-15 seconds instead of being instant
- listing my TV shows, music, or movies
- listing the contents of a specific TV show or music album
- playing a particularly piece of content -- it can spin for upwards of 10-15 seconds
- sometimes never returning search results at all -- it will just spin indefinitely
I'm running Plex clients from my web browser, Apple TV 4th gen, and iPhone 6S. PMS is running on a dedicated media server that is a mid 2010 Mac Mini with a 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo and 4 GB of RAM running OS X 10.11.4. All of my media is spread about among two 4 TB external hard drives connected using USB 3 or Firewire 800. The only other application running on this server is qBittorrent, which is generally idling.
The majority of the time I don't experience this slowness, and I've been unable to figure out what the root cause is. Here are some things I've checked or tried and subsequently ruled out as solutions:
- qBittorrent interfering. The slowness doesn't correspond with times where qBittorrent is active and using CPU cycles or hitting my disks.
- Friends or family streaming my media. This slowness has occurred when no one is streaming anything, and has failed to occur when someone was streaming something.
- My server being too slow. A friend is running PMS on a dedicated server that's an even slower, older Mac with a similarly sized library and he experiences no slowness at all. Search results are near-instant.
- My server not having enough memory. The combined memory usage of everything that's running is less than 2 GB.
- My hard drives going to sleep. I've set it up so that the drives never sleep, and have confirmed this is the case.
- Network slowness. This occurs even when streaming media over my local LAN with all devices involved being connected through wired ethernet.
- Wireless data slowness. This occurs frequently when I'm using my phone and I'm not connected to a wifi, but that's not the issue either because two of my friend's Plex libraries return instant search results in the same situation.
- My router. This issue has persisted over more than one router.
- Failure to optimize my library. Optimizing my library seems to make the problem go away for up to an hour, but it returns shortly afterwards.
- My hard drives having poor read or seek times. I've confirmed that they perform normally for a USB 3 or Firewire 800 external drive.
- Destroying and recreating my library: I tried this with my music library recently and it had no effect.
- Checking PMS logs: I haven't found anything revealing in there, aside from the occasional "SLOW QUERY" message, which usually is in the range of 250-1000 ms.
The only thing I can think of at this point that I haven't tried is blowing away my entire library and starting again from scratch, but I really, really don't want to do that. I like having it keep track of when I've played various media, what's next, what music albums were added when, and so on, and I really don't want to lose any of that metadata.
Can anyone help me diagnose what's going wrong? This is very frustrating, and it feels like my media server fails to perform at times when I want it to perform most. (e.g. trying to quickly put on a song while I'm in my car, and after entering a search query it just spins forever, never giving me any results)
