I figured out why my search isn't working

[theusedversion 35]

So I have posted before about my search not functioning sometimes (a lot actually).  And today I think I stumbled upon the answer.  I don't think it's waking my external drives.  Case in point:  I already had Emby up in my browser and I did a search for a movie to see if I had it.  I entered the title into the search bar and I got the loading circle.  It kept going and going and going.  I finally got tired of waiting so I opened up Windows Explorer and started looking through my drives.  I still had the browser up in case it popped up before I found it.  So I get to the drive that I would end up finding it on.  I clicked on the drive and it took a second to wake the drive and bring up the file structure.  And as soon as I did that, the Emby search completed.  I mean instantly.  I don't think it was a coincidence.  I can test it out again whenever it happens to me in the future.  So... where do we go from here?  Is there something I can do to facilitate Emby to waking up my drives?

Fake Edit:  So I did some searching around because I knew there is a place in Windows that you can change a setting and keep your disks from turning off.  I did this and performance is significantly improved for me as far as I can tell at the moment.  I will keep it like this for a while to see how it plays out.  But in the meantime, is there something else I can do to help Emby wake my hard drives faster or better so that I don't have to keep my hard drives always on?  Because that will significantly reduce the lifespan of the drives. :/

Edited May 1, 2016 by theusedversion

[Luke 37049]

Well the search is database driven, so it doesn't need your drives to be awake - but the thumbnail generation for display does, so that would explain it.

[theusedversion 35]

So is there something that I can do where I don't have to keep my drives awake all the time?  I have had zero issues with search since keeping them awake.

[Luke 37049]

For now, not really. We would have to look at copying all images to the server's data folder in order to prevent that.

[dcook 265]

You can set your image and metadata location different then your actual movie/tv media library locations.

 

I have my movie/tv media on a NAS and when not being used the drives goto sleep.

 

Emby is still able to search and display images since all that metadata is stored locally.  Once I click on a movie to play, the NAS wakes up the drive and it plays

Edited May 4, 2016 by dcook

[theusedversion 35]

I probably should have done that.  But it's too much of a chore to do it now.   I can use Kodi with the Emby plugin without issues so I guess I can continue to use that even though I don't quite like it as much as I do using the Emby web client.

Thinking about recording a video of my usage so that the performance of Emby can be seen.  Not sure if what I am experiencing is normal because I don't see too much talk on the forums and I'm sure there are a lot who have their images stored with the movies and use external drives.

Edited May 4, 2016 by theusedversion

[dcook 265]

It does not appear to be an EMBY issue, any disk drive will power down when not in use

 

I would just store your metadata somewhere else if you are using external drives for your library, you will have better performance as well

[theusedversion 35]

It does not appear to be an EMBY issue, any disk drive will power down when not in use

 

I would just store your metadata somewhere else if you are using external drives for your library, you will have better performance as well

Then why have the option to save images with the movies if it affects performance so much?  Seems like a bad idea to allow that.  Anyways, I manage my own cover images instead of getting whatever downloads with the metadata.  And I was advised to store them with my movies in my first post ever on the forums.    http://emby.media/community/index.php?/topic/25649-upload-images-only-works-about-80-of-the-time-for-me/

It's really time consuming to have to upload the images via the edit images function especially when you have a large collection.  Throwing them in the movie folder is so much easier.

[theusedversion 35]

And besides, I don't think it's just a waking the drives up issue.  It can take 5 minutes to just do a search sometimes.  I can wake up all of my drives quicker than that.

[dcook 265]

Storing the images with the movies would not effect performance if it was stored together on local disk.  The issue you have is you are using external disk, I assume USB, which is always slower, and the OS will put to sleep if not being accessed (unless you turn this off in power settings of the OS)

 

Since you want to keep your movies on slower external disk, the best solution is to set a metadata path to be a local disk and store all your metadata and images there.

 

As a footnote:

I have over 17TB of movies and TV and I have no uploaded or edited a single image.  

If you have them named correctly it will grab the metadata and do it all for you, there is no need to be uploading all the images manually, you are just wasting your time.

Edited May 4, 2016 by dcook