Hi all,
I have read many posts that show how can you setup a cache for google drive. I have already running an encrypted google drive with rclone and mounted without cache to serve as Plex media. It looks like its working fine but because I see everybody asking for cache setup for Plex I dont know anymore if I actually need a cache "layer" for streaming media with Plex?
Any thoughts on this matter are very wellcomed.
Thanks in advance.
Pablo
@morfellu Can you tell me where you read this? I'd like to correct that documentation. Was it documentation or reddit posts?
Just in reddit posts.
be careful @calisro
i reddit that if you reddit something enough times, you believe it.
you can believe me 
i reddit, the world is flat, i believe that that the world is flat
i reddit the man on the moon is made of cheese, i believe that the man on the moon is made of cheese.
i reddit that rclone needs cache, please someone help me!
Just to be clear when Im talking about cache I also refering to the VFS cache mount options. This is also not needed for Plex?
for my mounts, that i stream from.
i do not use cache
and
i do not use vfs.
what is your mount command?
Do you enable video preview thumbnails generation? And detecting tv show intros? Im not sure if enabling them could get to some API calling limit, or even a ban?
it all depends on what you want.
you are not going to get banned, but you could hit api limits.
but really, it is very, very hard to hit api limits.
for me, for my mounts for streaming, i use --read-only
no thumbnails, not detecting, no this, not that.
for your gdrive, i hope that you are using your own client id or service account?
No need to use cache or current vfs for Plex but the new --vfs-cache-mode full currently in beta is glorious and perfect for media streaming. Brings the media playback start time from 5 to under 2 seconds for me.
I run Plex and do the thumbnails and intros locally when media is added before moving to drive.
Hitting the API limit with Plex would be an achievement. 
Yes, Im using my own client id, thanks!!
Could you elaborate more on this? Im very interested!
if you use rclone mount, then you do use VFS. not sure what you are talking about.
vfs cache modes can be enabled for when you need to read/write to a file at the same time. I have encountered some software that needs this (bazarr is an example).
Here an example of my rclone mount command for my encrypted volume:
rclone mount gcrypt: /mnt/gcrypt --uid=1000 --gid=1000 --umask=002 --timeout=1h --tpslimit=10 --user-agent=RandomAgent --dir-cache-time=1440m --vfs-cache-mode=writes --vfs-cache-max-age=72h --vfs-cache-max-size=200G --vfs-read-chunk-size-limit=off --vfs-read-chunk-size=128M --rc --buffer-size=1024M
I also pair this mount with mergerfs using a command like the following:
mergerfs -o cache.files=auto-full,dropcacheonclose=true,use_ino,func.getattr=newest,category.create=ff,minfreespace=0,fsname=unionfs /mnt/move=RW:/mnt/gdrive=NC:/mnt/gcrypt=NC /mnt/gmedia
This works very well for me. I have a very large system - 120k TV episodes (215TB), 15k movies (200TB). My server is pretty decent (e3-1285v6, 64GB RAM, 4TB NVME, 1Gbps internet)
It is easy to hit API limits with my setup since it is so large. I use sonarr/radarr and there are settings in there that will analyze media (I turn that off). Bazarr grabs subtitles for me, it has a feature to scan in the media for subtitles and I had that turned off until recently. Generating thumbnails, performing extensive media analysis, scanning library automatically, generate intro video markers are all features in plex that can quickly have you hit your API max.
I am really looking forward to the new VFS caching features that are currently being beta tested. I feel that this might be the rclone feature that allows me to turn on some of these additional features mentioned above without hitting API limits.
also, my start time is nearly instantaneous, less than 1sec. When they aren't instantaneous, I know that I am having an API issue and that something has changed. Recently that change was the detection of tv intros, which I quickly disabled.
it all depends on what the OP wants, the OP internet connection and so on
for me,
rclone mount remote x: --read-only
4K from gcrypt, no problem.
never found a reason for more than that.
Sorry, I was referring specifically to the caching options of VFS.
you might want to check this out.
this is THE guide for gdrive and plex on this forum,
Thank you so much!! I will check it tomorrow with some more free time! Thanks.
yes, when i grow up, i want to hit that limit!
some how, some way, some day to hit that magical, mythical limit!
Hi again @asdffdsa. Does your plex server detect the changes automatically when you add a new movie or tv show to your mount?
@ookla-ariel-ride Does your mount setup automatically detect new media?
I have just realised that I have to manually trigger the Library Scan in PLEX to detect my new media just copies in the mounted drive.
Thanks!
