Very Slow Plex performance

Hey all, I'm new to using rclone and it could very well be that I've set up something wrong. So I'd appreciate any help I can get.
Also, if rclone/plex logs would help please let me know how to get them (at what level) so that i can attach them!
So when trying to play something on plex, where media is on a crypt mount I get unusable speeds. It takes anywhere from 1-3 minutes to start a video. Sometimes it just doesn't work. Also, if episode 1 works, if i go onto the next episode the duration will show as 2 hours instead of its actual 22 minutes.

The only thing I thought to do was to copy and paste one of my video files from the mount to a local folder on to the desktop. The transfer rates using "rsync" showed to be approx 30 MB/s. It is important to also note that with rsync it took a little while for the copy to start (maybe about 10 seconds).

I'm using my own client ID. Here is my mount command:

mount Drive: /MEDIA
--allow-other
--dir-cache-time 96h
--drive-chunk-size 32M
--log-level INFO
--log-file /home/rclone.log
--timeout 1h
--umask 002
--rc

PS: I also tried adding a library with a few of those files thrown into a local folder and the playback was just fine. So currently I know that the issue is with Plex+rclone, however I don't know yet where in that chain it is.
Any help would be appreciated.

UPDATE: adding the --user-agent option seems to have made it more stable. Now once a file starts playing it plays fine. Also the durations of the episodes are fine. Now the only remaining problem is the start times, around 40-60 secs.

Check out All of a sudden googleapi Error 429

Define another --user-agent="Something" on mount.

1 Like

Great!! I did that and now I seem to have consistency. Once It starts playing there seems to not be much problems. Also doing small skips (30 secs) seem to be working fine.

Now the only problem is the start times. Is it normal for it to be 40-60 sec start times? Same with large skips (unbuffered portions)

Make sure you setup your own client ID/API Key.

https://rclone.org/drive/#making-your-own-client-id

Yes, sorry forgot to mention I've already done that.
Thanks for the reply!

If you aren't seeing any errors, I'd recommend grabbing a debug log with "-vv" on the end of your mount command and share that back.

30-60 seconds is not common as I normally start in 2-5 seconds.

Sorry for the late reply
I decided to set up my mount again on a VPS just in case the bad times were due to my limited bandwidth at home
So I finally did it and it did reduce it but now it's at about 20 seconds
Here are the logs: https://pastebin.com/7z6YvkF9
PS as soon as it started playing i stopped the stream. I wanted the log to not be cluttered so that it's easier to read - its from just when i press play and then as soon as it played a exitted the stream.
Thanks!

It's easier to see the whole thing actually as I'm missing how you mounted it and the version info in the mount.

The log itself seems pretty good as there aren't any errors or retries and the player opens up the file to play and seems to be working well.

Are you able to tell if there are any other constraints?

Just to baseline, are you able to pull a quick mediainfo and how long does that take?

[felix@gemini Westworld]$ time mediainfo Westworld.S01E02.mkv | head -1
General

real	0m2.187s
user	0m0.116s
sys	0m0.014s

Thanks for the reply.
Here is the full log: https://1drv.ms/u/s!AvEDRwwyyDaxg8QRBUNEAPd6sRUlTA
and the media info was practically the same as yours,
real 0m1.719s
user 0m0.032s
sys 0m0.050s

Appreciate your help!

That helps to show that rclone is working well.

Are you able to check CPU/Memory/Network and such and see if you have a bottleneck there as it doesn't seem to be rclone from your logs.

Yup I play the file in one window and look at the VM summary on another window, CPU doesn't exceed 20% usage, Network d/l speed attempts to max out (I'm guessing that's what i want/expect) and memory is well below the 32gb it has.
To be fair 20 seconds is much better than the 60 seconds i used to have, but I'll still try and look for other reasons it's not acting as it should.
I appreciate your help and if there's anything you can think of for me to check please let me know

PS as a test, I copied one file over locally and used plex to stream it. Starting the stream took about 8-10 seconds. So this shows me that:
a. rclone mounting is still significantly slower than local files, which means somewhere in my setup there's something wrong
b. my baseline/goal is a 10 second start for some reason. I'll live with that though. Until maybe i can check if there's something wrong with my vps.

Are you able to tell if they are Direct Playing/Streaming or Transcoding as well? That would be the only other thing to check. My Direct plays startup in 3-6 seconds roughly.

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