I’ve been trying to upgrade from 10.10 to 10.11 for a while now, as the Android TV app keeps nagging me, and every attempt ended with impossibly long library scan times.
After some thorough investigation, it appeared that a Home Videos type collection causes unending scan (yet to be solved), but also that Jellyfin does a lot of writes to the config directory (either database or metadata or both). Mine’s on spinning media part of a ZFS pool. I tried a few performance tuning options, such as testing the config dir with recordsize (similar to block size) of 4K, 8K, 64K, 128K and library scans fell from 30-40 minutes down to 8-13min with 4K-64K. The ZFS tuning wiki suggest 64K recordsize with LZ4 compression for SQLite workloads such as Jellyfin. That seems to work as well as 4K and 8K but likely is faster when reading thumbnails and such.
Note that upgrading to 12-rc3, which is supposed to speed up library scans did not improve scan times for me. Optimizing config/database write speed did. I cross-checked the culprit by experimenting with moving the config dir to NVMe and RAM. Both of those got the scan times down to 8-9 minutes compared to the optimized spinning media’s 12-13.
So if you had upgraded (or about to) to 10.11 your library scans are (about to get) dog slow and your Jellyfin’s config dir resides on spinning media, optimize its write performance for SQLite.
I run the DB on the SSD and media on the hdds and haven’t had any issues, but I don’t have a huge library though. However, things are generally speedy. I thought the higher record sizes were recommended for media, not the DB? but if it worked for you, that’s good
64K is generally small recordsize. For media they recommend 1M. My db was sitting on the default 128K recordsize and perforned fine on 10.10. It doesn’t matter much for reads because ZFS keeps it in RAM and if it gets evicted it goes into SSD cache (l2arc). But for writes the cache wouldn’t help unless I disable sync which risks data loss. I don’t think 10.10 did much writes during lib scan so write perf only mattered when something changed.