Moving BI to a new PC - performance issues

[techfun]

Hi All,


I am trying to move my BI installation to a new PC and running into performance issues on the new PC. I am trying to find out if there is anything I can do to improve performance.


I have following cameras, all hardwired and running full resolution @ 15fps (total 32mp) for the past few months on a dedicated i7-3770k homebrew pc. CPU usage is very stable under 40% with BI running as service.It goes above 50% when recordings are being viewed. BI always ran smoothly on this PC.


8 x ds-2cd2032f-i
2 x ds-2cd2142fwd-is


Recently I purchased a new i5-4460 PC hoping to move BI to it since I need my i7 for a vmware installation.


I installed demo version on the i5 PC and cpu usage seems to be constantly at 80% and shooting past 90% whenever recordings are being viewed. The i5 pc is also producing ghosting in the recordings and starting recording couple of seconds late after motion started. Both i7 and i5 are hardwired to same switch and i7 doesn't seem to have any of these problems for the same recording.


I expected the i5 to be little slower but there seems to be big difference in performance compared to my old i7 and doesn't look capable of handling the my setup. Is it because of demo version on i5? or lack of Video card?

Processor	i7 3770k	i5 4460
Cores	4	4
Ram	16GB	8GB
OS	Windows 7 Pro	Windows 10 Pro
Graphics	Nvidia 650 Ti	HD Graphics 4600
CPU Usage	40%	80%

Direct to disk and hardware acceleration are enabled on both PCs. There is nothing other than BI running on either PC.

TIA

 

[fenderman]

It's because of the demo.. Direct to disc is not fully implemented.

 

[techfun]

It's because of the demo.. Direct to disc is not fully implemented.

Ok, thank you. I will move the license to new PC and see how it goes. Do you know how many times license could be moved back and forth between PCs?

 

[fenderman]

No idea.. If it stops working you will need to email support to reactivate it.

 

[Skispcs]

FWIW...

I had an I7-2600K running Blue Iris and it was running fine, for a few reasons I needed to upgrade so I bought an i5-4690K and the performance was worse than the older 2600K was quite noticeable. 8 Camera system on 2600K was around 35 to 40% and the i5-4690K was hovering around 80%.
I ended up moving back to the i7-2600K and used that system for another Blue Iris install and bought an i7-4790K for the Blue Iris box.

That 2600K still kicks some butt compared to most of the new CPUs out now.

Edited for spelling and grammar

 

[nejakejnick]

2x higher load on i5 compared to i7 should be expected, but that does not mean that i7 would handle 2x more cameras. CPU usage is a lie when using i7 with HT, simply because the Windows performance monitoring thinks there are 2x more equal cores, which is not true.

Although even if i7 may not handle much more cameras than i5, I would expect the system to be much more responsive under the same load.
Unfortunatelly I have currently no means to test BI on i7.

see:
Hyper-threading – how does it double CPU throughput?
i5-4690k vs i7-4790 (surprisingly one thing was almost 2x faster)
Intel Core i7 Hyper Threading (HT) ON and OFF comparison (performance and temps)

 

[techfun]

At least in my situation it does look like i7-3770k pc is more than twice powerful as i5-4460. The i7 is a homebrew pc with a fairly high end motherboard, RAM etc, while i5 is a budget Dell (possibly with a cheap motherboard). I am sure it made some difference. Right now I have them both side by side connected to same switch.


BI on my i5 has three major problems making it unacceptable as a BI server.


1) Ghosting in the recordings
2) Slow to start recording and skips portions of recording
3) BI on i5 reports only 9 - 10fps (cameras are set at 15fps and i7 pc reports 15fps exactly)


The i7 has none of above issues when same recordings are compared. I think the difference is more real than cosmetic cpu usage in Windows performance monitor. These are just my observations. It might help somebody if they are planning to run a similar setup as mine.


BTW, I temporarily updated i5 pc with BI license key, it didn't look like it made a lot of difference. But I could only test it for a very short time. Others might have a different experience.

 

[dalepa]

What disk do you have in both systems? Where are you storing the data? SSD? I5 using the same Network as the i7?

What does task manager performance show when all the cam's start recording? I suspect CPU maxed when recording...


I suspect 10 HD @15FPS cams is close to a limiting out the I5 during recordings.. Change you Cams to 10FPS and you may be ok with very little IQ loss.

 

[techfun]

What disk do you have in both systems? Where are you storing the data? SSD? I5 using the same Network as the i7?

What does task manager performance show when all the cam's start recording? I suspect CPU maxed when recording...


I suspect 10 HD @15FPS cams is close to a limiting out the I5 during recordings.. Change you Cams to 10FPS and you may be ok with very little IQ loss.

Both are storing on SSD and on the same network.

When recording, task manager shows 50 - 60% on i7 while i5 hovers close to 100%. I think all i5 problems mentioned my above post are symptoms of maxed out CPU.

 

[dalepa]

Both are storing on SSD and on the same network.

When recording, task manager shows 50 - 60% on i7 while i5 hovers close to 100%. I think all i5 problems mentioned my above post are symptoms of maxed out CPU.

Yep, CPU maxed... reduce the Frame Rate on your Cams from 15 to 10 and your I5 CPU should be OK...

 

[fenderman]

Both are storing on SSD and on the same network.

When recording, task manager shows 50 - 60% on i7 while i5 hovers close to 100%. I think all i5 problems mentioned my above post are symptoms of maxed out CPU.

If you have not applied the license to the demo i5 system, I assure you that its causing some of this issue because direct to disk is not fully implemented and HA is not working properly.

 

[techfun]

Thank you fenderman. Here's an update...


I have moved the license as well as 650 ti graphics card to i5 PC. FPS immediately jumped to 15 and all recordings problems are resoved. The cpu usage on i5 dropped to 65% and it goes up to 80% when recording. I don't think it will be able to handle any more cameras in future, but in the short term it looks fine.

 

[fenderman]

Thank you fenderman. Here's an update...


I have moved the license as well as 650 ti graphics card to i5 PC. FPS immediately jumped to 15 and all recordings problems are resoved. The cpu usage on i5 dropped to 65% and it goes up to 80% when recording. I don't think it will be able to handle any more cameras in future, but in the short term it looks fine.

if you take the card out and run hardware acceleration using intel graphics you will see a big cpu drop.

 

[kboxvegas]

Yup, take out the nvidia card and enable HA. I have a nearly identical Haswell E3-1225V3 with 9 3MP HIK's @ 15fps. With HA it idles at 33% and peaks to 58% with all cameras triggered. When viewing recordings it sits around 47%.


Lenovo TS140 E3-1225 V3 - Intel HD P4600 - Intel C226 chipset - Win 7 Pro 64bit 12GB ECC - BI 4.2.8.4 - 6 3MP Hikvision's

 

[techfun]

Perfect! My i5 is now idling at 35%.

I left the graphics card in the PC and connected the monitor to the graphics card. And then connected a Display Emulator to the HDMI port of the motherboard which is driven by integrated graphics.

http://www.amazon.com/CompuLab-4K-Display-Emulator-fit-Headless/dp/B00JKFTYA8/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1454631747&sr=8-2&keywords=fit+headless

Both HD 4600 and Nvidia graphics card are enabled in the Device Manager...

 

[kboxvegas]

Nice, glad to hear you got it worked out.