Today I mounted a WebDav share to the host and passed it in to Jellyfin and added it to my library. Then, I realized that Jellyfin is downloading the entire contents of the mount as it scans the library (I can’t actually see what it’s downloading but it’s been using 10mb/s for the past hour). So it’s trying to download 1TB of media just to scan the library. I am not even trying to access anything. Is this normal?
I mean, WebDAV is basically just HTTP.
Accessing a file over WebDAV will result in the file being downloaded, so it makes sense that trying to scan terrabytes of files will result in terrabytes of downloads.
You probably want to use nfs/smb instead, since that’s more designed for random-access type situations, though you’d STILL end up pulling all the data down since iirc jellyfin scans the entire file so you’d still be in the situation of having to download all the data even there.
I have turned off generating trickplays, etc. so I don’t see why Jellyfin can’t just read metadata to scan the library.
I went and whacked the scan library button on a 30tb library collection and it didn’t read all that much data (looks like under 100gb) and seemed to be pretty quick - maybe 45 seconds. Local drives and all that, so the speed of the scan doesn’t matter as much as the relatively small amount of data. If all you had was 1tb of media, I’d expect it to just be a couple of gigabytes, not huge amounts of data.
I’d probably double-check that however you’ve mounted the WebDAV share is supporting partial reads, since that really feels to me like the first place that something could be wrong that would cause excessive amounts of file transfers.
Not supporting partial reads could be the issue. I’ll take a look at that.