If You Run Plex on Linux...

thanksajdotcom

Ok, so I've found a really handy command for my fellow Linux users. I run my Plex server on a Ubuntu Server 14.04 LTS server. It works great, but I've only allocated 2GB of RAM to the VM. That is fine but I've noticed that sometimes after watching a show or after it's been running a while and I've used it at all, the memory usage is unusually high, often around 1.5+GB being used out of the 2 total. Well, I figured it's just a caching issue. Turns out that was the case. So what I did was I found a command to clear out all the buffers and cache on the server.

 echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

That is meant to be run as root, else you would run...

sudo sh -c  'echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches'

I have set this up as a cron job in crontab by running this:

sudo crontab -e
0 */6 * * * echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

This runs the command every 6 hours on my server at the turn of the hour, so midnight, 6AM, noon, and 6PM. I've become a huge fan of cron jobs!

Thought I'd pass this along to the rest of you. Hope it helps!

Thanks,
A.J.

Rob Dunn

@thanksaj Nice!

I run Plex on Linux and have noticed that performance will decrease over time. Never really dug into it. I'll do this tonight I'm sure it will make my kids happy!

thanksajdotcom

@Rob-Dunn Yup, I hope it helps!