Search Very Slow (3 minute response)

[Rumzzz 31]

@brian5678can you be more specific? Are your loading issues more than just from the search page? If you are having slowness/loading issues in other places can you create a separate thread and include log files for those, so they can be tracked properly by the devs?

[bandit8623 213]

18 hours ago, Rumzzz said:

It looks like about half of my cores.

Are you able to search with multiple words without issue? How big is your library / what kind of content is it?

yeah when i do i dont really see any cpu usage at all.  also searches are all super fast.

Edited November 20, 2025 by bandit8623

[Rumzzz 31]

Are these all TV/Movies? How many items in the library?

My cache is set to 10GB (4GB database file), only Music.

Lately I've found some single word searches that are taking forever (like War) regardless if it's put in quotes. But then I'll type Beyonce without quotes and results come back instantly, so I am not sure anymore if this issue is exclusive to multi-word searches. 

[bandit8623 213]

Just now, Rumzzz said:

Are these all TV/Movies? How many items in the library?

My cache is set to 10GB (4GB database file), only Music.

Lately I've found some single word searches that are taking forever (like War) regardless if it's put in quotes. But then I'll type Beyonce without quotes and results come back instantly, so I am not sure anymore if this issue is exclusive to multi-word searches. 

tv movies and music.  not much music.

when i type "war" its all up in 1-2 seconds

 

 

[Rumzzz 31]

How large is your library.db file?

My files have a bunch of tags (performer, composer, feature, studio, etc.) that may be influencing the query time.

Generally speaking, 30tb of music is a lot more individual items than 30tb of videos, but yours seems like a mixed case.

[bandit8623 213]

5 minutes ago, Rumzzz said:

How large is your library.db file?

My files have a bunch of tags (performer, composer, feature, studio, etc.) that may be influencing the query time.

Generally speaking, 30tb of music is a lot more individual items than 30tb of videos, but yours seems like a mixed case.

500MB

are you using hardware raid, software raid, no raid. for storage?

Edited November 20, 2025 by bandit8623

[Rumzzz 31]

Yeah db size might have something to do with it (maybe in combination with inefficient sql querying?), mine is nearing 4.5GB.

Edit: The emby server install is on an NVME drive, all the music files are spread between 4 HDD (combined into a single virtual volume using drivepool)

 

Edited November 20, 2025 by Rumzzz

[Rumzzz 31]

Hi @Lukeis the "People query fixes" in 4.9.2.7-beta related to this issue? If so I'll update and test.

[Luke 42077]

19 minutes ago, Rumzzz said:

Hi @Lukeis the "People query fixes" in 4.9.2.7-beta related to this issue? If so I'll update and test.

Hi, no it’s not.

[slicedmass 6]

Just to add, I am experiencing this since the latest update as well. They aren't minutes long but much longer than before. Sometimes 5 to 10 seconds for anything to show up.

 

Edit: as an example, if I search the word groove. Then the movie emperor's new groove shows up in 1 second. If I search new groove, it takes 7 seconds until anything shows up.

Edited December 8, 2025 by slicedmass

[Chillout 110]

i can report same issue.  

Searching for: spider man 

takes forever (like 5minutes of spinning wheel)

Searching for: "spider man"  

with parentheses is very fast, seconds.

[TuXFire 1]

Same for me:
Jurassic park >>> search very slow
"Jurassic park" >>> result instantly (less than 1 second)

[bandit8623 213]

14 minutes ago, TuXFire said:

Same for me:
Jurassic park >>> search very slow
"Jurassic park" >>> result instantly (less than 1 second)

tried both.  both fast for me. the quotes just narrows down the output to 6 items.

[slicedmass 6]

4 minutes ago, bandit8623 said:

tried both.  both fast for me. the quotes just narrows down the output to 6 items.

Jurassic was 1 second for me

Jurassic Park was 5 to 6 seconds.

[Happy2Play 9780]

On 12/7/2025 at 5:20 PM, slicedmass said:

Just to add, I am experiencing this since the latest update as well. They aren't minutes long but much longer than before. Sometimes 5 to 10 seconds for anything to show up.

 

Edit: as an example, if I search the word groove. Then the movie emperor's new groove shows up in 1 second. If I search new groove, it takes 7 seconds until anything shows up.

This is what I see also.  5 to 10 seconds depending on the search words and about 1 second for same search in quotes. 

As the unquoted search is looking for everything that contains either word.

Edited December 12, 2025 by Happy2Play

[bandit8623 213]

3 minutes ago, Happy2Play said:

This is what I see also.  5 to 10 seconds depending on the search words and about 1 second for same search in quotes. 

As the unquoted search is looking for everything that contains either word.

i do have my data on a hardware raid ssd array as well,  so that could be why mine is very very quick for both

[Chillout 110]

This is a problem (no workaround) when using the Roku app because paratheses " ."  are not part of its keyboard. 

 

[Rumzzz 31]

I've also had multiple users report that even single word searches (Like WAR or Leon) also results in seemingly endless spinning, even when put inside quotes.

Seems like the users reporting that this isn't a problem for them are either running on ssd raids or have smaller database sizes.

[speechles 2055]

22 hours ago, Chillout said:

This is a problem (no workaround) when using the Roku app because paratheses " ."  are not part of its keyboard. 

 

 

The Roku does have access to a full keyboard. It is just broken down into different keyboard styles. There are 3 keyboard styles: General, symbols, and accents. The double quote is under symbols. You can mix keyboard styles when entering text to search by.

Edited December 15, 2025 by speechles

[adminExitium 355]

6 hours ago, Rumzzz said:

even single word searches (Like WAR or Leon) also results in seemingly endless spinning

Does this happen only on the first query or even if you do multiple searches one after the other? Can you provide logs for this? I have a 7 GB DB file and searching for either of those returns results in <250 ms on average.

The DB is on NVMe but that should affect only the first query, any subsequent tries should be served from the DB cache in memory.

[Rumzzz 31]

In the case of searching for WAR, both the initial search and subsequent searches all take me 4-6 minutes to return results. I've attached a log file immediately following this test.

embyserver.txt

[Neminem 1518]

Hmm I don't see is with the search term "war"

 

 

 

[Rumzzz 31]

Honestly at this point I have no idea how to narrow this down. A loading screen doesn't seem to be much help.

2025-12-15 12-42-32.mkv

[Neminem 1518]

@RumzzzNot sure, but look at these load times and responses, what is going on here.

These are from you logs posted on 11-11-2025.

Interrupt query due to cancellation.2025-11-11 16:09:16.362 Info ItemsService-0HNH1CN5BBTK4:00000006: http/1.1 Response 500 to 127.0.0.1. Time: 103191ms. GET http://127.0.0.1:8096/emby/Users/b359ca2fc14041ccb9800a0996d6f474/Items?Fields=BasicSyncInfo,CanDelete,CanDownload,PrimaryImageAspectRatio,ProductionYear,Status,EndDate&StartIndex=50&SortBy=SortName&SortOrder=Ascending&EnableImageTypes=Primary,Backdrop,Thumb&ImageTypeLimit=1&Recursive=true&SearchTerm=kanye west&GroupProgramsBySeries=true&Limit=50&EnableTotalRecordCount=false&IncludeSearchTypes=false&X-Emby-Client=Emby Web&X-Emby-Device-Name=Google Chrome Windows&X-Emby-Device-Id=bcdaceb6-a5db-4de3-9d40-b2d9a6972af7&X-Emby-Client-Version=4.9.1.90&X-Emby-Token=x_secret2_x&X-Emby-Language=en-us. 
 

[Chillout 110]

searching for "war" takes a long time

searching for "wargames" or "warcraft" is almost instant for me as it pulls up a few videos or tv shows with that information.

It seems the server is trying very hard to display everything at once before displaying it rather than just displaying it as it finds it (like windows search).  And while its looking the server becomes sluggish and unresponsive even though its only use 10% cpu