Blueiris lag despite low CPU usage

[udsco]

Hi all,

I am hoping to get some help with my setup below, please note that I am not a professional network engineer/installed. These are being used at my retail shop.
I have the setup below but am getting a lot of lag on my cameras, this lag steadily increases if I activate more than about 5 cameras (this does vary). My CPU usage is only about 40-50% with 5 cameras active but the lag still exists. The lag at time can be a couple of minutes on some cameras.

Optimisations I have tried:

• Cameras set to H265+
• Quicksync activated
• All cameras on Direct to disk recording
• Frame rate set to 15fps on both the camera and in Blueiris

My setup is that I have 2 switches, Switch 1 is connected to Switch 2 and my PC is plugged into Switch 2. Switch 2 then plugs into my router. Cat6 cables have been used throughout.

SPECS:
Computer with BlueIris: OptiPlex 5080 (10th Generation Intel® CoreTM i7-10700 (8-Core, 16MB Cache, 2.9GHz to 4.8GHz, 65W) with 16GBDDR4 non-ECC Memory
Switches: 2 x TL-SG1016PE (TP-LINK)
Cameras: 16 in total, majority are Hikvision - DS-2CD2385G1-I however I have had most disabled as the lag gets very bad.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

 

[fenderman]

Blue iris does not support + or smart codec. Set it to 265.

 

[SouthernYankee]

where is it lagging on the BI monitor ? On your phone ?
Define lagging. Is it one second 10 seconds, 60 seconds, 5 minutes ?
Are you using wifi for the cameras or viewing the cameras ?

Provide screen shots of
1) Blue iris status (lighting bolt graph,upper left corner) clip storage tab
2) blue Iris status cameras tab
3) cameras setting from in the camera (NOT BI) frame rate, iframe value, bit rate quality......

 

[udsco]

Hi guys, thanks for your replies.

• It is lagging on the monitor of the PC running BI.
• When I say lagging there are a couple of things, the time differential between the camera time and blueiris time get further away from each other, see below

- lag is also evident from the images where the video is jerking and when looking art multiple cameras it is clear that they are not in sync (i.e. the same person appearing in multiple locations at once)

Below is the camera setting for all cameras: I have switched off 265+ at fenderman's suggestion. I did notice that when I switched from 265+ to 265 the bitrate of the cameras pretty much doubled.



Below are the blueiris stats. the condition of these stats is I have 8 cameras enabled and CPU usage is between 65-75% and Ram 5.76G. With this many cameras enabled all the cameras are very laggy.




thank you again!

 

[udsco]

Not sure if this helps, but when I reduce the number of active cameras to 6, there is no lag and the stats are as below:

 

[wittaj]

Camera time and BI time are not the issue and is a separate issue - that is an issue with you not having a NTP to sync all the times across your system.

Match frame rate and i-frame rate. That should help the lagging some.

 

[udsco]

Camera time and BI time are not the issue and is a separate issue - that is an issue with you not having a NTP to sync all the times across your system.

it's not the time I am worried about, it's the changing difference in time that happens when it is lagging. i.e. the camera may be 10 seconds off to BI time, but after 20 mins it may be 2 mins off to BI time. I notice when this happens I can also usually notice the image becoming laggy and skipping frames.

I will try the iframe and frame rate matching

 

[mioutlook]

Do you have substreams setup for all of your 8k cameras in BI? Even if you are direct to disk recording BI still needs to decode the video if you do things like motion detection. Intel QuickSync, like all hardware accelerators, can only decode so many frames at once. Mine seems to fall back to CPU decode but since that is much less efficient you eventually run out of CPU as well.

This post is helpful:

Optimizing Blue Iris's CPU Usage

Blue Iris uses a lot of CPU time. In most Blue Iris installations, your CPU is the limiting factor which determines how many cameras you can have. As such, it is extremely important to optimize your configuration to ensure you can get the most out of your system while consuming the least...

ipcamtalk.com

 

[spammenotinoz]

Hi guys, thanks for your replies.

• It is lagging on the monitor of the PC running BI.
• When I say lagging there are a couple of things, the time differential between the camera time and blueiris time get further away from each other, see below

View attachment 82839
- lag is also evident from the images where the video is jerking and when looking art multiple cameras it is clear that they are not in sync (i.e. the same person appearing in multiple locations at once)

Below is the camera setting for all cameras: I have switched off 265+ at fenderman's suggestion. I did notice that when I switched from 265+ to 265 the bitrate of the cameras pretty much doubled.

View attachment 82841

Below are the blueiris stats. the condition of these stats is I have 8 cameras enabled and CPU usage is between 65-75% and Ram 5.76G. With this many cameras enabled all the cameras are very laggy.

View attachment 82842


thank you again!

From this you are not using sub-streams, and without that your PC won't cope with that many 8MP cameras.
I also note that only a few of your cams are working with hardware acceleration.
If the lag occurs after a few hours, and you notice a FPS drop, could be associated with memory leak and the intel drivers. In which case suggest going with CPU decoding to start with sub-streams, to get it stable. When stable turn on hardware decoding.

 

[bp2008]

Hi @udsco

I notice in your status window screenshot that the cameras not using hardware acceleration are operating at reduced frame rate (assuming all your cams are set to 15 FPS). This strongly suggests that your system is overloaded. Just counting the cameras you have enabled in that screenshot, you should be at 995 MP/s but your status window shows only 771 MP/s. If you had all of the cameras enabled at once, the load would be substantially higher!

Here's what you should do:

1. If you are on an earlier version of BI 5.3.9.X, update to 5.3.9.8 (or newer). There was recently a bug which caused hardware acceleration to fail and randomly turn itself off for many cameras.
2. Re-enable hardware acceleration for cameras with - under the HA column in Blue Iris Status window. The I symbol means Intel acceleration. - means No acceleration is active. This is re-enabled by going to the camera properties, video tab, and changing the hardware acceleration option from "No" to "Default".
3. See if your computer's memory is in a dual channel configuration. If it is single channel, that could be a big contributing factor to your performance ceiling there.
4. Double-check that direct-to-disk is enabled on all cameras and in all Blue Iris profiles that you use (which may be just the first profile, or multiple, depending on your configuration).
5. And finally, configure sub streams in Blue Iris to reduce the computational requirements. Confirm that it is working by checking the Blue Iris Status window, where the "Sub" columns should be filled in.

 

[Erickbiker]

Following, having the same issue with “3” 8mp cameras. Sometimes the delay can be 3 minutes but when i log-in to the camera’s browser there is no lag only in blue iris main console. I also have 1 ptz camera thats has 0.5 sec lag which is in my opinion close to real live.

 

[SouthernYankee]

@Erickbiker

Provide screen shots of
1) Blue iris status (lighting bolt graph,upper left corner) clip storage tab
2) blue Iris status cameras tab
3) cameras setting from in the camera (NOT BI) frame rate, iframe value, bit rate quality......


======================================
Private ip addresses. Local IP addresses. These addresses are NOT used by the internet. They are for your local home/business network.
10.0.0.0 to 10.255.255.255
172.16.0.0 to 172.31.255.255
192.168.0.0 to 192.168.255.255

Note there is no reason to redact local ip addresses when posting.

 

[looney2ns]

Also make certain you have excluded Bi folders and the BI .exe file from Windows Defender or any other antivirus you may be using as per the BI help file.