Huge amount of network usage

[Tracch]

Greetings Everyone,

I have been lurking the forums now for a while and had great success in resolving all my previous issues. I'm unable to figure out why Blue Iris is using almost 10% of my network port which is rated at gigabit speed. This is just one camera recording motion and a copy created for alerts.

The PC is a Intel i5 4690K and the camera is Hikvision DS-2CD2332-I. I do record at a high resolution and FPS but I didn't think it cause this much resource hogging. I have tried disabling the copy stream and still no change. Direct to Disk is set and I can post any other settings, you may have to tell me where they are.

I do plan to add 4 more cameras in the future and a i7 PC dedicated.

 

[fenderman]

@Tracch Welcome to the forum. That is abnormal. Does it go to zero when you disable the camera?
Are you recording to the local pc or to NAS?

 

[bp2008]

That is very curious. You have the bit rate set to 3072 (which is rather low for the resolution / FPS you have set) so you should be seeing only about 3 Mbps usage. Higher if you are currently doing any sort of remote viewing into Blue Iris, but not that much higher. Look at the Performance tab and select the network adapter and see how much of that is send vs receive bandwidth.

Also look at the Status window in Blue Iris. Look at all 3 tabs, Messages, Cameras, Connections, and see if you find anything unusual there.

 

[Tracch]

EDIT - I disabled the Virtual Machine adapters but that didn't make any difference. Next, I went into Resource Monitor on this physical ethernet port, filtered the TCP connections and noticed ALOT of listings for this computer Blue Iris is on along with another address. Went to the router and saw that it is someone else's PC. I closed the browser that had Blue Iris webview open and now the adapter shows Blue Iris using 3.0Mpbs just as bp2008 said. What would you recommend the bit rate set to?



Thank you both for taking time to look at this.
@fenderman - Yes, disabling the camera does drop it down to 0.1Mbps.
@bp2008 I have attached the picture showing network usage on this adapter right after enabling the camera again.

 

[bp2008]

I am very surprised that remote viewing uses 100 Mbps. That may warrant further investigation because even when I stream 4K resolution jpeg-compressed video out of Blue Iris it only gets to about 35 Mbps. Usually the network usage is a lot lower than that.

As far as camera bit rate, there is often no reason not to max it out, as it will deliver slightly better quality at very little cost (it may be double the disk cost for a 10% quality improvement, but usually the system can handle that and more). There are cases though where a lower bit rate is a good idea. Like if your network can't handle the increased load, or if your storage device can't hold an acceptable amount of video. Or if you are sending the main stream from the camera out over the internet where bandwidth is limited and/or expensive. But much of the time people are sending the video over a wired LAN and recording on motion detection to an enormous hard drive and the systems could easily handle the extra load of the highest bit rate. Luckily you can still have most of the quality with a low bit rate.

Something I have been doing lately is setting my cameras to use variable bit rate encoding. I choose the best/highest quality level, and set a very high bit rate limit. The way variable bit rate encoding works, the camera will use a lower bit whenever it can do so and still meet your chosen quality level. Depending on the camera and the scene and recording schedule, this may result in substantial disk space savings without making you sacrifice image quality when it is needed most.

 

[Tracch]

Good info to have. I bumped the max bitrate to as high as it will go on the camera itself (12288) and that bumps the network traffic to 12Mbps.