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Emby server crashing


Tim40

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This is a plain install of 4.6.4.0 on FreeNAS/FreeBSD inside a jail from the official FreeBSD repository. I haven't installed any plugins and there are no other major changes from the defaults. It crashed while I was browsing my music on the Android app trying to pick what to play next. I have been casting to Chromecast Audio just before that but there was no music playing when it crashed. This has happened before, too. Log files attached. Thanks!

emby_logs_210918.zip

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This is a plain install of 4.6.4.0 on FreeNAS/FreeBSD inside a jail from the official FreeBSD repository. I haven't installed any plugins and there are no other major changes from the defaults.

Watching recordings while they are still being recorded has been so bad that I'm almost about to give up on it. This is one of the main reasons I bought Emby, because I wanted to watch sports while they are still being recording and skipping the commercials. I'm watching by casting to Chromecast, directly in Chrome on Windows or using the Android app. At any given time usually 2/3 of those don't work. The UI freezes up, or it just reverts back to paused or nothing happens when I click play. Sometimes it will play and then if I pause it it won't resume any more. Its very frustrating. Playing recordings that have already been recorded usually works pretty well.

That leads to the second set of issues (when playback starts). When I'm able to play/cast in-progress recordings it is just a terrible experience. Sometimes my stream keeps stopping after a minute and resets back to the beginning. Sometimes this happens if a pause and resume. After the playback starts the remaining time of the recording starts from 0 and is slowly counting up (maybe at about 1.5x of playback speed). I can't skip forward (+10s) or jump forward past the current "end" of the recording even if there are hours of already recorded content. If I try to skip/jump past the current "end" that resets the playback form the beginning and it also reset the "end" of the recording so it starts counting back up from the beginning again. Even if I'm careful to not hit the "end" of the recording, the buffer is so small that if I skip forward (using the +10s button) a few times I hit the end of the buffer and the playback stops. At this point sometimes it will resume by itself after buffering, sometimes I have to manually resume it, sometimes it won't resume at all on the same device and I have to continue watching on a different device, sometimes it will reset the playback from the beginning, and sometimes the server will crash. This has been a real struggle. :(

I'm attaching the log files from one such crash while I was watching a live recording. Also included a few screenshots showing that recordings names looked all messed up after I restarted the server. I had to try them all to figure out which one is the one I was playing. :( 

I apologize that this sounds like a bunch of complaining and piling things up, but I'm really frustrated and this use case is one of the main reasons for getting Emby. The whole experience has been very "rough" compared to using Emby for offline media playback.

To summarize:

1. Playback doesn't even start for in-progress recordings. I have to try multiple clients until one works. Casting to Chromecast is usually the worst but is the most useful to me. :( Works much better for non-live recordings. Casting live TV also works better in general.
2. Can't skip/jump past the "end" of the recording. The "end" starts at the very beginning and moves very slowing (about 1.5x playback speed).
3. Buffer is too small so I can only skip 30-40s before playback stops and often this is followed by the other issues (can't resume, or restarts from the beginning, or crash).

Any help or guidance is appreciated. Are there any settings that I can change to improve (3) and (2) above?

This is running in a FreeBSD jail and the machine has 128GB RAM and plenty of CPU and only one concurrent stream most of the time.

Thanks!

 

emby_logs_210912.zip

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If you still have problems with crashes can you try deleting the full "/var/db/emby-server" directory after stopping the daemon?
Take care though this deletes your full metadata of your libraries but helped for me.
After readding all my libraries again it was fine and didn't crash anymore.

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adrianwi
On 19/09/2021 at 07:34, Duffyx said:

If you still have problems with crashes can you try deleting the full "/var/db/emby-server" directory after stopping the daemon?
Take care though this deletes your full metadata of your libraries but helped for me.
After readding all my libraries again it was fine and didn't crash anymore.

That seems like a somewhat extreme solution!

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  • 2 weeks later...

I haven't seen new crashes but I'm not using it much. I've only used it twice to watch live games since I posted. All the live playback issues are there. Last Sunday I tried casting to chromecast and it stopped working after a few minutes. I didn't bother anymore and just watched in the browser on my laptop careful not to touch anything because I feared it would crash the server and interrupt the recording or restart from the beginning and then I have to wait before I can skip forward to the same point.

I haven't tried deleting "/var/db/emby-server", yet, either. I'll report back when I have time to play around more and if I get any new crashes.

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Just had to restart the server because it was not accessible from the web UI or from the Android client. I've maybe used it once in the last 3-4 days to play a single flac file and I have some live TV recordings set up. Sometimes it would just crash and not come back up, but this time it was up but inaccessible. Logs attached.

 

emby_logs_211007.zip

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Happy2Play
1 hour ago, Tim40 said:

Just had to restart the server because it was not accessible from the web UI or from the Android client. I've maybe used it once in the last 3-4 days to play a single flac file and I have some live TV recordings set up. Sometimes it would just crash and not come back up, but this time it was up but inaccessible. Logs attached.

 

emby_logs_211007.zip 71.27 kB · 0 downloads

Looks like a auto restart happened in log (embyserver-63769221373).

2021-10-07 16:36:12.599 Info App: Automatically restarting the system because it is idle and a restart is required.

But the next log "embyserver-63769221436" threw a database error.

2021-10-07 16:37:16.369 Error Main: Error in appHost.Init
	*** Error Report ***
	Version: 4.6.4.0
	Command line: /usr/local/lib/emby-server/system/EmbyServer.exe -os freebsd -ffdetect /usr/local/lib/emby-server/bin/ffdetect -ffmpeg /usr/local/lib/emby-server/bin/ffmpeg -ffprobe /usr/local/lib/emby-server/bin/ffprobe -programdata /var/db/emby-server -noautorunwebapp
	Operating system: Unix 12.2.9.0 
	Framework: Mono: 5.10.1.57 (5.10.1.57 Tue Jul  6 14:33:15 UTC 2021)
	OS/Process: X64/X64
	Runtime: usr/local/lib/mono/4.5/mscorlib.dll
	Processor count: 32
	Data path: /var/db/emby-server
	Application path: /usr/local/lib/emby-server/system
	SQLitePCL.pretty.SQLiteException: Busy: database is locked - PRAGMA journal_mode
	SQLitePCL.pretty.SQLiteException: Exception of type 'SQLitePCL.pretty.SQLiteException' was thrown.
	  at SQLitePCL.pretty.SQLiteDatabaseConnection.PrepareStatement (System.String sql, System.String& tail) [0x00055] in <1319f47a49f34f6db3822eb2e43ff130>:0 
	  at SQLitePCL.pretty.DatabaseConnection.PrepareStatement (SQLitePCL.pretty.IDatabaseConnection This, System.String sql) [0x00009] in <1319f47a49f34f6db3822eb2e43ff130>:0 
	  at Emby.Sqlite.BaseSqliteRepository.PrepareStatement (SQLitePCL.pretty.IDatabaseConnection connection, System.ReadOnlySpan`1[T] sql) [0x0000e] in <699f7a715e2f45e7acf1d30455a0e299>:0 
	  at Emby.Sqlite.BaseSqliteRepository.CreateConnection (System.Boolean isReadOnly) [0x003ba] in <699f7a715e2f45e7acf1d30455a0e299>:0 
	  at Emby.Server.Implementations.Data.SqliteItemRepository.Initialize (Emby.Server.Implementations.Data.SqliteUserDataRepository userDataRepo, MediaBrowser.Controller.Library.IUserManager userManager) [0x0000c] in <05979d9270ab4dafac52ba5587e41c17>:0 
	  at Emby.Server.Implementations.ApplicationHost.InitDatabases () [0x00042] in <05979d9270ab4dafac52ba5587e41c17>:0 
	  at Emby.Server.Implementations.ApplicationHost.Init () [0x0013b] in <05979d9270ab4dafac52ba5587e41c17>:0 
	  at EmbyServer.HostedService.StartAsync (System.Threading.CancellationToken cancellationToken) [0x001b2] in <8ccf8f27cb0f48d4b56d1fcea2dfef91>:0 
	Source: SQLitePCL.pretty
	TargetSite: SQLitePCL.pretty.IStatement PrepareStatement(System.String, System.String ByRef)
	

A LOCKED database happens when the database is not shutdown properly or possibly multiple instances of Emby trying to run.  But your current running Embyserver log appears to show everything running again.

But a dev would have to comment more on this as Emby sent the restart command.

But you can change this auto restart behavior on Dashboard-Settings.

Allow the server to restart automatically to apply updates
The server will only restart during idle periods, when no users are active.

 

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  • 1 month later...

Yes, still having all the issues and more. I gave up on reporting because I don't see any real progress or engagement. :( Watching recorded videos and listening to music seems ok with only occasional crashes, but to be honest I don't use Emby much for this (maybe once a week for <1 hour). I noticed recently that skipping ahead on a recorded video on the Android client works quite well. Last time I tried skipping ahead while casting from Android to Chromecast it was super slow and annoying.

Watching videos while they are still being recorded form live TV is still a mess. In addition to all the problems I have already reported, sometimes recording will start playing from the beginning and sometimes at or close to where the live broadcast is. Honestly I haven't put more efforts to understand where the difference is coming from. It usually happens after I hit one of the other problems that forces me to restart the playback on the same or a different client.

The problem with all tuners being locked is still there, too. Recently I ran into an issue where I was not able to play anything and all tuners were locked and restating Emby didn't fix the problem as usual. Attempts to restart the service resulted in an error stating that emby-server is already running. I had to reboot the jail to fix it that time.

I also continue to get random freezes and server crashes during playback. Sometimes the sever crashes without me interacting with the client in any way (pause/resume, skip, or even switch to a different browser tab/window). Sometimes the playback would just stop after the first 5-10 minutes and won't go any further even after multiple attempts and restarts from the beginning so I just give up and switch to watching the live broadcast. I suspect that this might be happening at a point where the server switched tuners or files or something else (because of early start of the recording) but I haven't really looked into it. When this happens the replay always stops at the exact same spot and I think once the recoding is complete the whole video can be played.

At this point I have given up on watching live broadcasts while they are being recorded. It's just a source of frustration. I don't regret supporting the Emby project but I'm disappointed from the lack of support. I'm probably going to get one of the paid programming services for my trusty WMC, which works flawlessly for live broadcasts.

 

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  • 11 months later...

Coming back to say that everything has much improved now. Haven't seen any crashes recently and live tv/dvr is quite usable now. Thank you!

 

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