heavy remnant
Kometa frequently freezes during the overlay preparation phase (e.g. "Loading All Movies" or item processing) for 5–10 minutes at a time, then briefly continues, but eventually stops completely without logging any errors or warnings. It never reaches the overlay application stage (no "Applying Overlay" or "Overlay Applied" messages).
This happens consistently on my large library (17,000+ movies). The process can run for hours but always aborts before completion.
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neat nymph
Are you deliberately limiting memory for Kometa?
Available Memory: 0 GB```No, I am not limiting memory — the container has no artificial cap from my side, and stats show it’s barely using RAM.
neat nymph
Generally when Kometa abruptly ends in the middle of a run without an error in the log it's something outside of Kometa killing it. Running out of memory is often times the cause, but perhaps it's something else.
I'm not sure I've ever seen Available Memory: 0 GB, but that appears to be what the container sees and I'd imagine Kometa surely needs more than that (especially for a large amount of overlays on a large library).
heavy remnant
This is an example from the log
[2026-01-02 08:59:08,095] [overlays.py:593] [INFO] | |
[2026-01-02 08:59:08,096] [plex.py:1178] [INFO] | Processing Plex All Movies |
[2026-01-02 08:59:09,988] [builder.py:2293] [DEBUG] | |
[2026-01-02 08:59:09,989] [builder.py:2294] [DEBUG] | 17351 IDs Found |
[2026-01-02 08:59:10,014] [builder.py:2296] [DEBUG] | |
[2026-01-02 09:11:50,632] [overlays.py:613] [INFO] | 17351 Items found for Overlay File (3) runtime_info |
[2026-01-02 09:11:51,111] [overlays.py:617] [INFO] | |
[2026-01-02 09:11:51,118] [builder.py:207] [INFO] |====================================================================================================|
Look at the timestamps. It stops for 12 minutes unexpectedly.
tawny kraken
I imagine it is spending 10 minutes extracting runtimes from 17351 movies in a very memory-constrained environment.
heavy remnant
No, I'm not deliberately limiting memory.
Here is docker stats during an active run (while it was "frozen" / paused for several minutes):
CONTAINER ID NAME CPU % MEM USAGE / LIMIT MEM % NET I/O BLOCK I/O PIDS
f0c94d2bb79a kometa-task 58.76% 135.3MiB / 1.712GiB 7.72% 13.4MB / 223kB 0B / 0B 0
Memory usage is only ~135 MiB (7.72% of limit), with over 1.5 GB free. CPU is moderate (not pegged at 100%). This proves the container has plenty of memory available and is not OOM-killed or starved.
tawny kraken
Something unusual is going on; I've never seen a system report that there is 0 memory available at the start of the run, and 2GB is a pretty low allotment for such a large library.
There is nothing to go on here aside from the two facts that the available memory is low and Kometa is pausing at a moment when it should be loading a lot of information, and probably paging a lot due to low memory.
We're offering suggestions based on our experience running the tool, which is all we can do.
You could try a run in trace mode to see if anything more interesting shows up in the log, or try running it through a memory profiler to get a picture of memory use over time.
neat nymph
It sounds like you might be describing two different observations. The first is that Kometa appears to be freezing for long intervals. Like Mr. Carrot said, Kometa is probably still performing some actions, however they are just not captured in the log by default. I just did an overlay run with the flags -tr -lr -db and that did capture a few additional lines in the log, so that may give you some additional insight as to where that time is being spent.
The second is that Kometa is abruptly ending in the middle of a run. This is probably the point where you want to be looking at the docker stats, not at the time when Kometa is "freezing". This is more likely to be the point where Kometa is running out of memory and being killed off.
tawny kraken
I can't find that "example from the log" in the log at the top of this thread. That log appears to end during an earlier overlay.
heavy remnant
Please tell me what steps I should take now?
neat nymph
Does the machine you're running Kometa on have more than 2GB of memory?
neat nymph
The easiest answer would have been allowing Kometa to use more memory, but like you said you're not limiting that in any way and now we know the machine physically doesn't have more than that.
You could try breaking up your config and attempting to run one overlay per run, and see if that's able to complete successfully.
You could also try running Kometa on another machine. Kometa and Plex do not need to be run on the same machine.
tawny kraken
Here's specifically what's happening during this time:
This is a log() of an empty line:
[2026-01-02 08:59:08,095] [overlays.py:593] [INFO] |
Then Kometa calls this bit of code to gather the list of all the things that get this overlay:
builder.filter_and_save_items(builder.gather_ids(method, value))
which drops us into builder.py.
The builder.gather_ids(method, value) sends us to plex.py, where we collect all the IDs in Plex and log a single line:
[2026-01-02 08:59:08,096] [plex.py:1178] [INFO] | Processing Plex All Movies
And then we're back in builder.py processing the builder.filter_and_save_items part:
First thing we do is log how many things we are working with:
[2026-01-02 08:59:09,988] [builder.py:2293] [DEBUG] |
[2026-01-02 08:59:09,989] [builder.py:2294] [DEBUG] | 17351 IDs Found
[2026-01-02 08:59:10,014] [builder.py:2296] [DEBUG] |
We've consumed two seconds so far.
Here we loop over the 17351 items, gathering information, making sure they all match the library type, dropping items that don't qualify for the overlay, etc.
This is taking ten minutes.
When that's done, we're back in overlays.py, where we log how many things ended up as part of this overlay:
[2026-01-02 09:11:50,632] [overlays.py:613] [INFO] | 17351 Items found for Overlay File (3) runtime_info
[2026-01-02 09:11:51,111] [overlays.py:617] [INFO] |
and then move on to the next overlay.
heavy remnant
I installed it on another machine (with 32 Gb memory) and it looks to be working fine. I thought Kometa must be run on the same machine as Plex
karmic ivy
Kometa can he run on any machine you want to run it on, as long as it can communicate with plex
gray rampartBOT
chazlarson used !aenh
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