Rclone cache/vfs slow to start Plex playback

Help and Support
1

Hi guys, I am seeking some help with my setup. I used to used Plexdrive to stream my media from Google Drive via Plex. I have decided to rebuild my server in a VM and started from scratch, I am using rclone vfs but I have also tried rclone cache. My issue is that when pressing play on Plex it can take up to 2-3 minutes for playback to start and when it does start there is occasional buffering.

I have a quad core (8 thread) Intel Xeon at 3.4Ghz
16GB RAM for the VM
4TB Local Disk Space

I have never had any issues previously, I have posted my rclone mount settings below and to be honest I’m not 100% sure what each variable does so if someone has a sweet spot and can help me it would be much appreciated.

I should also note that I have a fairly large library (About 40TB) and have made the changes recommend here also.

ExecStart=/usr/bin/rclone mount
–rc
–log-file ${LOGS}/rclone.log
–log-level INFO
–umask 022
–allow-non-empty
–allow-other
–fuse-flag sync_read
–tpslimit 10
–tpslimit-burst 10
–dir-cache-time=160h
–buffer-size 1G
–timeout 5s
–contimeout 5s
–attr-timeout=1s
–stats 1s
–vfs-read-chunk-size=32M
–vfs-read-chunk-size-limit=2G
–vfs-cache-max-age=5m
–vfs-cache-mode=writes \

2

Are you playing directly from the mount or using something else like unionfs?

3

Playing directly from the mount.

4

What’s the player you are using as well to test out?

5

Various, LG TV, Chrome, iOS, Fire TV Stick, Xbox all give similar results.

6

Which version of Rclone are you using?

I know some old versions of Rclone can make you switch to Drive API V3 which is a lot slower.

7

The latest version v1.43.1

8

@Animosity022 I have seen a couple of configurations posted by you in other threads and have experimented with these but no luck. Do you have any idea what could be causing the really long delay when starting media. Generally once it plays it plays okay and my server is more than capable of transcoding multiple 1080p streams no problem.

9

Can you share the debug logs when you start to play something?

10

Well, I have 10 mbps home internet. I hosted my plex server on an IP4 NAT VPS, bandwidth capped at 80 mbps. Using plex mount configuration below, my movies direct played after 2-4 sec for 1080p movies <4 Mbps bitrate and 8-12 sec for 1080p >9 Mbps bitrate.

Mediainfo on <4 Mbps movies took 4-8 sec, while on >9 Mbps movies took longer, usually 7-16 sec.

–rc
–log-level INFO
–umask 022
–allow-non-empty
–allow-other
–fuse-flag sync_read
–tpslimit 8
–tpslimit-burst 10
–dir-cache-time=160h
–buffer-size=96M
–attr-timeout=1s
–vfs-read-chunk-size=8M
–vfs-read-chunk-size-limit=512M
–vfs-cache-max-age=5m
–vfs-cache-mode=writes \

11

You can take out the fuse-flag if you aren’t using cmount as it is already compiled with that and ignored.

1 Like