Plex, Mac OS X and the Python instances
So several months ago I was in Atlanta visiting some friends (Hi, Justin!) and got hooked on his hackintosh Plex box. Now, I wanted to run it on a Mac Mini, instead of a hackintosh, but the application was great. Since then I have purchased the Mini and had a blast getting Plex working and tweaked to do what I want.
If any of you out there running Plex have noticed that there seems to be quite a few instances of Python running when you have Plex up, here’s why: each plugin that you have runs under it’s own instance of Python. Here’s what the development docs have to say:
Each media server plug-in runs in its’ own process, in a separate Python instance. This ensures that plug-ins can’t interfere with each other, or with the operation of the server.
So there you have it. Essentially, each plug-in is sandboxed from each other as well as PMS.
If you want to see this in action, just shell into (or open up Terminal) when running Plex and execute the following command:
ps -ef | grep Python | grep -v grep | grep "Plug-ins"
You should see one entry for each of the plug-ins that you have installed.
Related posts
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Then explain to me why the hell Plex keeps crashing with the never ending beach ball when left idle?
The only conclusion I came up with were the Python instances, but those actually are related to Plex Media Server and not Plex proper. For some reason, when Plex is left idle (say the screensaver is running), it will eventually crash/lock up with the never-ending beach ball.
If you’re not seeing it Andy, then it’s possible it’s because I’m using a Hackintosh.