Plex Might Be Indavertently Bottlenecking You
Plex has this Relay feature that basically pipes your traffic through their servers if direct access isn't possible for whatever reason, bypassing NAT and presumably cutting down on their support tickets.
For free users the relay is capped at a measly 1 Mbps and the [ever-growing expense that is the Plex Pass subscription service only bumps this up to a whopping 2 Mbps.
I can imagine this being useful for a selection of people. But as this feature is turned on by default, it's very easy for any issues with your server's network configuration to go unnoticed. It turns out my port-forwarding rule for Plex hadn't been working for several months (thanks Ubiquiti) and I never noticed because the relay feature was masking the problem.
So... you're telling me Plex isn't meant to be almost unusably slow this whole time...?
It doesn't help that the remote-access configuration UI has been very buggy for 6+ years, making it impossible to tell if the issue is with your server or the broken interface.
So please don't make the same mistakes as me. Make sure your Plex client is actually connecting to your server directly, and use a Port Forward Checker.
There was a comment section here. It's gone now.
As of March 16th, 2025 the United Kingdom's Online Safety Act has gone into full effect. The law presents a lot of challenges for hobbyist websites like this one to present any user-to-user content (like y'know, blog comments) and comes with some pretty serious repercussions for non-compliance.
The odds of Ofcom (the regulator whose job is to enforce this) kicking my door down over this blog are low if we are being honest with ourselves. But the odds are at least somewhere above zero and the punishment is a life ruining £18 million fine(!!) so it's just not worth the risk.
A kind lawyer has written up the implications of this law for self-run blogs like this one and the only way to guarantee that I am not in-scope would be to manually review all comments made before being available to the public. Not to be a big baby about it all but I don't really want to do this! I liked my current setup!
So I guess as a little act of protest and to hedge against any risk I've removed the comment section entirely. Sorry about that!
If you want more information on this and how much this sucks for the hobbyist internet please read this writeup.
