Emby Server (Rasberry Pi 4) - 100% CPU usage when shuffling music by genre

[mrmatt 7]

Hello!  I've been running Emby Server on a Raspberry Pi 4 for a couple of years now.  I've been able to stream my music and movie collection to all of my devices (TVs, PCs, phones, etc.) through the Emby app with mostly no issues.  I love the software and the server usually runs great.

Recently however (within the last month or so), if I shuffle music by any genre (via the Music -> Genres menu), the entire Emby service appears to freeze with one CPU core stuck at 100% usage - here is what the terminal 'htop' command returns:

At this point the server and app become unusable and I have to reboot the Pi to make it usable again. 

Shuffling music by genre used to work instantly, but now it locks up Emby.  Shuffling all music (regardless of genre) still works instantly.  I can also shuffle by artist with no issues.

I have no problems when I shuffle movies or TV shows - this issue only appears to affect music shuffling by genre.  I have tried deleting the music library and rebuilding, but that made no difference.  I have tried updating all system packages, but that also made no difference.  I'm still running Raspbian v11 (bullseye) - do I need to upgrade Raspbian to v12 (bookworm)?  Do I need any firmware updates?  Or could a recent Emby update have caused this issue?

I'm running on version 4.8.10.0.

Any help is greatly appreciated!

Edited January 27, 2025 by mrmatt
Add Emby Server version number

[Luke 42077]

 

Hi there, let's look at an example. Please attach the information requested in how to report a media playback issue. Thanks!

 

 

[mrmatt 7]

Hi Luke, I've attached my embyserver.txt log file.  Around 14:37 is when I attempted to reproduce the issue by shuffling music by genre, which made the client app unresponsive (with a loading spinner) and locked up the service for about 20 minutes until returning a series of 500 errors around 14:58.  Please let me know if there's any more data I can attach!

embyserver.txt

[mrmatt 7]

I noticed that there is an option for "debug logging", so I've enabled that and attached another log just in case.  Around 15:14, I reproduced the issue again by shuffling all Classical music, which locked up Emby until about 15:42.

embyserver-debug.txt

[vincen 71]

hi @mrmatt

Welcome at Emby and unhappy it's one of the annoying bug present there since ages and that has "no solution"

Vincèn

[Luke 42077]

Hi, we are working on improving this. Thanks for reporting.

[mrmatt 7]

Thank you!  Happy to hear it's being worked on!

[mrmatt 7]

Just following up on this post to confirm that, after updating my Emby Server to the latest version (4.9.1.90), shuffling music by genre appears to be working again.  I can once again shuffle my music tracks by genre without locking up the server.

Thanks much!