Jellyfin High CPU usage over 24 hours

Insight & Feedback
1

I installed Zima, and the first thing I set up was Jellyfin. In the first few hours, it was using 100% CPU, which I know is normal based on what I’ve read in forums. However, when I came home from work, the CPU usage was still high, which made me think something might be wrong.

Now it’s the second day, and the usage is still high. I transferred about 90GB of video files onto the drives and pointed Jellyfin to them. But now, whenever I open Jellyfin, I just get a constant spinning circle—it’s been like this for two days.

Is it possible that it’s still indexing, or could something else be causing this?

Server Specs:

  • CPU: 12th Gen Intel i7-1255U (10 cores, up to 4.10 GHz, 12 threads)

  • GPU: Intel Iris Xe Graphics

  • RAM: 16GB DDR4

2

doesn’t sound normal to me at all. never seen 100% usage on my much much older intel xeon e3 1270 cpu with jellyfin. indexing is like no more than 16% percent whenever I scan my library for new files.

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3

during multiple re-install’s I’ve had to do of zima due to hardware failures or upgrades I usually start off with jellyfin version 10.10.7 stable. create my library and setup transcoding settings to my liking then uprade it to 10.11.6. some reason in my experience starting out with 10.11.6 gives me hassle and wont load properly.

4

First few hours at 100% is normal, but 2 days + Jellyfin not loading isn’t, so it’s likely stuck.

Most of the time it’s one of these:

  • background tasks (thumbnails / previews) looping
  • a bad media file causing scan to hang
  • storage path dropping out (very common if DAS/USB sleeps)
  • no GPU acceleration → CPU gets hammered

Quick check — when you open Jellyfin dashboard, does it say it’s still scanning constantly?

Also grab logs, this will tell us straight away:

docker logs jellyfin --tail 50

If you see the same file or scan repeating > that’s your issue.

In the meantime, I’d temporarily turn off:

  • preview thumbnails
  • chapter images

then restart Jellyfin and see if CPU drops.

If your drive is sleeping or disconnecting, Jellyfin will keep rescanning forever, that’s a big one on ZimaOS.

Send the logs if you can, I’ll narrow it down fast.