BI camera connectivity and webserver behavior

[kcorbin]

Hi all - I've been running Blue Iris on a dedicated Win 10 PC for a couple years now supporting 8 cameras: 7 5231s and 1 recently swapped to a 5442.. specs of the BI system are below. The cams are driven by 2 ZyXEL 8-port PoE switches, daisy chained, connected to a second NIC on the PC. For the most part, everything has been extremely stable with a couple recent exceptions. Last night at about quarter after 11, all of the cameras dropped out of Blue Iris, indicated by constant network retries in the log file until I noticed I couldn't connect this morning. 1 camera did manage to come back on its own immediately and stayed online all night. The BI load on the PC usually sits under 15% and was well into the 90s when I found it this morning. I connected to a couple of the cameras directly and everything was fine on that end. I rebooted the PC and everything came back normal. Has anyone experienced this before or have any thoughts as to what kind of upset might have triggered this? My wife connected via the app this morning and saw all of the cameras offline. When I tried to connect, the webserver refused me.. which leads to my second anomaly..

Back in August I was having intermittent issues with the BI webserver where it would work normally for a while and eventually start refusing connections. Restarting BI restored the connectivity for a period of time and eventually it would fail again. This happened for 3 or 4 days and then it suddenly resolved until today (2 months later). After the recovery from the event last night, the webserver has been behaving the same again. The configuration of the system has remained unchanged. I did update BI to the latest stable release today to see if anything would change. Any thoughts on what might be going on for either of these scenarios are greatly appreciated!

Kasey


Version: Release 5.3.2.11 x64 (9/25/2020)
OS: Windows 10 Pro
CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8700K CPU @ 3.70GHz [12%]
RAM: 2.36G/31.6G

 

[sebastiantombs]

Sounds like the dreaded video driver update. Does your machine update Win10 automatically? Check the video driver version. Another possible culprit is failing memory. Maybe run a mem test.

 

[kcorbin]

Thanks for the reply. I do not have Win10 updating automatically. I'm running a driver from August (27.20.100.8587). I installed this intentionally back when I was having the previous issues with BI connectivity. I will run a mem test and see if it comes up with anything.

KC

 

[kcorbin]

No luck on the memory test uncovering anything.. everything passed. The BI webserver continues to behave erratically this evening. I've had to restart BI 4 or 5 times to get it to accept connections from the IOS app again. I did notice that when this happens, if I go to the BI workstation and click on the 'connections' tab of the event viewer, the entire app locks up and must be forced quit. Not sure what is going on here. It's particularly odd that this connectivity problem disappeared for 2 months and now has returned.

 

[sebastiantombs]

Something changed somewhere, but where? Are you using sub streams?

 

[kcorbin]

Nope, no use of sub streams. They are all disabled in the camera configs and the main streams are only used by BI. So far the web server has remained running and accepting connections through the night to present. Maybe the issue will just disappear again..

 

[sebastiantombs]

You should try sub streams. I have 14 cameras running on an i7-6700K using sub streams and the CPU utilization rarely hits 10%, even with the console open. Sub streams are used for console display and motion detection while the main streams are written directly to disk. When you view a single camera the stream switches to the main stream and when viewing clips the main stream is used. Kind of the best of both worlds, but you would need to reconfigure motion detection for each camera.

 

[kcorbin]

I totally missed when this was added to BI5. Thanks for the heads up. Not sure it will change much with the issues I'm running into, but it sounds like a better setup nonetheless! Thanks again.