infinite /dev/loop devices

[jplimpens 0]

For all having the same issue and looking for a solution........

 

Since the last update my Synology NAS started to perform bad.. Took me a while before I found the reason... about 210,000 /dev/loop device mounts on /tmp/emby. The NAS starts having a slow webinterface once it hits 31,000 /dev/loops mounted. As it turned out Emby had created infinite /dev/loop devices of sizes about 1GB to 7GB mounted on /tmp/emby/b[some hex].

 

Restarting the NAS cleand the loop devices and mounts, but after 5 to 10 minutes Emby would start creating the devices again, mounting them on /tmp/emby (no content playing or whatsoever). My content is a micture of mkv and iso files, but I surely don't have thousands of iso's.

 

After lots of google and forum search I found the solution on this forum in an old post. Adding the lines below to /etc/sudoers and rebooting the NAS fixes it. Question is, why would emby create infinite loop devices while nothing further is happening; why not just create a mounted loop device while playing an iso (and clean it up afterwards)?

 

Lines to add to /etc/sudoers:

 

## Entries Added for Emby Server Support

Defaults:emby !requiretty
emby ALL=(root) NOPASSWD: /bin/mount
emby ALL=(root) NOPASSWD: /bin/umount
emby ALL=(root) NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/mount
emby ALL=(root) NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/umount

[Luke 37009]

Hi, so you do have iso files?

[jplimpens 0]

Hi, Sorry for the late reply.. but yes.. I do have iso files.

[Luke 37009]

Have you considered converting them to mkv?

[jplimpens 0]

After a long time running stable, last week I had pretty much the same issue.. Therefor this update.

 

Last week I rebooted my NAS and after a couple of days it started to perform bad and before I was able to search for the problem it became inaccessible. After reboot I had a look at the loop devices and I noticed emby was creating loop devices based on the iso's. Just not mounted to an iso. A dmesg showed me loop devices were created, but without mounts. 

 

I made a script which removes the loop devices and once run emby stops creating loop devices. However, restarting emby (or the NAS) it starts creating these loop devices again. So as a precaution I now run the script every night until I find a better solution. 

 

Regarding the question of mkv: yes and no.. I did have a look at it, but decided not to. Space is not a problem and I don't want to spend a lot of time turning these iso's into mkv. Also I wouldn't want to lose any content (I like the DVD way with menu, special stuff and so on).

[Luke 37009]

Thanks for the feedback.