Plex transcoding causing unclean shutdown.  The server hangs, the power light is still on, but apps, services, gui, are all unreachable.  I can’t even ping the machine.

Hi, I’m having this issue where every time Plex has to transcode something, my unRAID server totally crashes.  I’m using the linuxserver docker image.  I’ve previously had a mod check my logs to which they’ve said there’s nothing and it probably points to this being a hardware issue.  I can’t see anything in Plex’s logs either.

 

What I’ve tried:

 

Thinking it might be a setting I’ve entered wrong - Changing the way I use RAM for transcoding (shm/tmp/none) - makes no difference 

Thinking it’s a problem with RAM - Memtest - several passes, no problems 

Thinking it may be a problem with the PSU - CoreFreq - several extended cpu tests - no issues

What I’ve noticed:

 

I’ve enabled the iGPU first via the classic way (editing the Go file), and now by installing the GPU-Top? addon.  Both methods result in the iGPU being found and shown in Plex, and “hw” is shown when transcoding is performed.  Transcoding normally is fine for between 1-5 minutes before crashing the server.  However I’ve managed to watch an entire movie via transcoding whilst the server was undergoing a parity check.  Several tests showed extended successful transcoding during a parity check.  This lead me to believe that the machine only crashes when it’s NOT running a parity check.  However, this morning during another parity check, it crashed.  When I restarted the server I immediately received a notification that the parity check completed successfully.  I thought perhaps it had just finished when the crash happened, but I actually believe the parity check should have continued for a few more hours.

 

I’d be really grateful if anyone can suggest anything to try in diagnosing this issue.  Unfortunately I have no spare hardware to try swapping components.  This is getting really frustrating.  Thanks 👍
 

Here’s my first post with diagnostics and syslog output.

 

 

 

Here's a screenshot of what the iGPU was doing when the server just crashed.  It's definitely crashing whilst doing a parity check too.

Edited April 29, 20242 yr by Garek
Changing GPU to iGPU for clarity purposes

Just attaching new Diagnostics and Syslog export in case anyone can have another look for me.  Latest crash happened at 11:10am

 

Thanks for any help you can give.

All_2024-4-29-11 20 13.csv defiant-diagnostics-20240429-1119.zip

May be a Plex issue.  Many people (and for many years) have had issues with a corrupt Plex codec causing issues when attempting to play media encoded in some formats.  Usually shows itself as the client reporting an error, but not a stretch to think it could, in certain circumstances, cause the docker or even the server to crash.

 

The fix is simple, and does not cause any other issues if it isn't the root of your problem.  Go into your Plex appdata and delete the contents of your Codecs directory.  Restart the Plex container and Plex will download fresh codec files.

 

Hey @ConnerVT, thanks for the suggestion.  Unfortunately, that didn't work. 😞

@Garek Did you ever find any solutions to this? I believe my server is exhibiting the same behavior

2 minutes ago, Vulpita said:

@Garek Did you ever find any solutions to this? I believe my server is exhibiting the same behavior

Yep, I swapped my CPU from an i5 9600K to an i5 8500T and never had any problems again.  Not sure if something was wrong with the original CPU, or whether there was an incompatibility with the motherboard though.