Improve very slow library scans on Jellyfin 10.11 / 12 on spinning media

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Improve very slow library scans on Jellyfin 10.11 / 12 on spinning media

I’ve been trying to upgrade from 10.10 to 10.11 for a while now, as the Android TV app keeps nagging me, and every attempt ended with impossibly long library scan times.

After some thorough investigation, it appeared that a Home Videos type collection causes unending scan (yet to be solved), but also that Jellyfin does a lot of writes to the config directory (either database or metadata or both). Mine’s on spinning media part of a ZFS pool. I tried a few performance tuning options, such as testing the config dir with recordsize (similar to block size) of 4K, 8K, 64K, 128K and library scans fell from 30-40 minutes down to 8-13min with 4K-64K. The ZFS tuning wiki suggest 64K recordsize with LZ4 compression for SQLite workloads such as Jellyfin. That seems to work as well as 4K and 8K but likely is faster when reading thumbnails and such.

Note that upgrading to 12-rc3, which is supposed to speed up library scans did not improve scan times for me. Optimizing config/database write speed did. I cross-checked the culprit by experimenting with moving the config dir to NVMe and RAM. Both of those got the scan times down to 8-9 minutes compared to the optimized spinning media’s 12-13.

So if you had upgraded (or about to) to 10.11 your library scans are (about to get) dog slow and your Jellyfin’s config dir resides on spinning media, optimize its write performance for SQLite.

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OK so you don’t understand networking, don’t understand how Plex works, don’t understand how that CVE does nothing of the sort, and have poor reading comprehension skills.

I’d hate to be your poor server.

I quoted Plex documentation where it explains in detail that you need port 32400 OPEN for remote access. https://support.plex.tv/articles/200289506-remote-access/

I linked the CVE but here is the plain language version because you didn’t read what I linked:

https://www.howtogeek.com/over-300k-plex-servers-are-still-vulnerable-to-attackers-despite-emails/

“The flaw has been assigned a CVSS score of 10.0, the highest possible level of severity. This score indicates that the vulnerability can be exploited remotely over the internet, is easy to execute, and requires no authentication or interaction from the server’s owner. A successful attack could result in a total loss of confidentiality, integrity, and availability. An attacker could access, modify, or delete a user’s private media files, or even disable the entire Plex server. "

What the fuck is wrong with you?

You clearly don’t understand how Plex and port forwarding work if you think that is in any way the same as opening a port to the Internet for everyone to hit jellyfin with zero security on it.

The CVE has been exploited zero times that we know of, and at worst they can delete your media files and Plex server. It’s never been reported of happening, and we have no idea how difficult it is to do - but because it hasn’t happened, it’s probably extremely hard and requires a chain of very unlikely things to have happened first.




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