Make your library scans faster by subfoldering videos

[vector991 0]

I migrated over to Emby Server (Windows) a week ago from a centalized MySQL Kodi setup.  With the Kodi Emby addon, everything is very seamless and provided a central backend that Kodi lacks... so props to the dev team for all the hard work on the awesome work!   (Seamless with exception to the In-progress/Random TV show widgets that fail to play because the play button expects file rather than show folder..   I have a custom modded skin https://github.com/Vector991/estuary-classic-max/ if anyone wants a workaround for that).

 

Anyhow, everything was fine except I noticed that the movie library was scanning every time I made a change (added, deleted, renamed) an existing movie.  That scan usually took a few minutes and was most annoying because if I made another change, I was not sure if it would rescan again after or mess things up.  I have a 11 folders (movies+tv shows) on separate shares that is being monitored.  Movies were mostly 1 file per movie, so I would have like 800+ movies in a single folder.

 

I decided to reorganize with a quick script to move every single video file to a subdirectory with the same name, even if it was just one video file for a particular movie.  My complete library scan now takes 1 minute vs 8 minutes.

 

I believe someone had mentioned this before, and I'm validating that as of 3.2.60.6 this is what I think is viable for a dramatic improvement in scan time though I don't prefer having 1 folder per movie.  Having not looked through the emby code, I'm guessing the long scans have to do with the looping through of video files and with each iteration, having to check for multi-version/images/extras/etc..   So for 800 files I had, it was likely iterating through the same 800 file directory (cached in memory I think because little disk activity) with each video causing constant 25% cpu usage and no log messages written during that time.  Just my guess.

 

I'm content now   that when I add/change a movie, I don't see that scan progress icon anymore in the library management and it updates within 20 or so seconds.

 

[Luke 42080]

Hi, thanks for the feedback. We'll test this out.