Need help diagnosising Unraid Crashes

[Almerish]

I apologize if I am a bit upset in this post. Just got woken up by family that they crashed my server 8 times in a row in 30 minutes and mildly upset.

For the last couple months I have been running into an issue where Unraid keeps hard crashing and rebooting. Specifically I use my server to host a Plex server. Ever since I started compressing my video files to save space (hitting almost 14TB of video) and switching to have SRT (subtitle files) for my movies I have been having an issue of constant crashes. I made a comment about this in April on the Binhex - Plex support but haven't gotten any reply since then.

As far as I can tell these crashes are happening when my server has to render video. In the case of SRT it needs to render the file into the video. So it will crash unless I make the video render to a lower quality. I will go weeks without this being an issue and then it just randomly happens and the people that it crashes on are tech illiterate and just keep crashing it over and over again thinking it just won't crash again doing the same thing over and over again.

Is there anyway that I can get logs to persist through hard crashes that cause Unraid to Reboot? This has been my most frustrating point to figure out since I can not tell what is going wrong exactly. It appears that this issue is mainly being cause by MKV files which is another reason I have been trying to move from MKV to MP4. I have tried changing settings between GPU and CPU rendering and both seem to have the same issue.

I should also state this seems to only be an issue when using Plex. If I direct connect into my server I can play these files just fine through VLC, which is also making me want to try out Jellyfin to see if it will fix this issue.

I am running a parity check right now to make sure nothing got corrupted and then going to uninstall and reinstall the Plex Docker to see if this magically fixes my issue. If this does end up being a hardware issue I can upgrade the hardware in my server ... however I am unsure of how to properly upgrade the hardware without losing all of my data (have not researched into this and me being able to afford this is a recent development).

If anyone can help me with general troubleshooting of this issue to help figure it out / stop it I would greatly appreciate it.

[JorgeB]

5 hours ago, Almerish said:

Is there anyway that I can get logs to persist through hard crashes that cause Unraid to Reboot?

Enable the syslog server.

[JonathanM]

15 hours ago, Almerish said:

Ever since I started compressing my video files to save space (hitting almost 14TB of video) and switching to have SRT (subtitle files) for my movies I have been having an issue of constant crashes.

No idea if this is relevant or helpful since I personally don't use plex, but I have seen several mentions of deleting a codec folder in the plex installation and allowing it to be rebuilt. Maybe investigate that angle and see if it gets you anywhere?