SOLVED: System suddenly running at 100% CPU

wittaj said:
Yeah, I cannot run HA with my Sunba. It was flaky. Turn it off and then make sure that the settings within the Sunba are identical to the ones that work. Mine had to run either H264 or H265 and 12 fps or it wouldn't work in BI. I will look it up and confirm.
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Thanks for confirmation. What's weird is that the other Sunbas work just fine. If I bring up any of the others, I see the degraded lower substream resolution for about 1-2 seconds, then it snaps to the main stream. Not so with this quirky one. If I bring it up full screen, it stays on substream and it isn't recording to BI.

I don't know if HW VA is what's affecting this, as I'm seeing the error on some of the Hikvisions, Amcrests, and Dahuas as well. For some reason this one Sunba doesn't provide a main stream - even though the status window shows both as available.

I did a screen grab of the BI cam settings for all Sunbas and they are identical. Same thing with the camera's actual settings - they're all identical.
 
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Yeah, I think it is just cheap components in the Sunba and something is wacky on that one. I know it was lots of trial and error to get mine to work. It either was that rainbow or wouldn't playback. Some goofy stuff. Because you can't set the Sunba to 15fps and 15 i-frame, I think that is part of the issue as well.
 
wittaj said:
Yeah, I think it is just cheap components in the Sunba and something is wacky on that one. I know it was lots of trial and error to get mine to work. It either was that rainbow or wouldn't playback. Some goofy stuff. Because you can't set the Sunba to 15fps and 15 i-frame, I think that is part of the issue as well.
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Well, based on your suggestion, I simply disabled the HWA at the video tab on BI for that camera. Presto. It's working as it should. More of a workaround than a fix, I suppose, but hey, they were cheap, and they've lasted this long. I can't complain. Might be time for an upgrade :)

Nevermind... Problem came right back. It's obviously something between BI and teh camera. LIve camera stream on the CMS/camera GUI is 100% fine. And when I have BI to a restart of the stream, it's perfect for about a minute.
 
Sweet! Yeah, good camera for what it is. Figure one camera without HA isn't too bad.

Since you have like 80 cameras LOL, are you using any of them as spotter cams to mimic autotracking for the Sunba PTZ? I have several cameras calling a preset when there is motion and the Sunba moves around almost like following them. I call it the poor-mans autotrack LOL.
 
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Haha... Well, it didn't solve the rainbow freezing. I disabled sub-stream and HWA completely. No dice.

So now, this camera won't play nice with BI. I'm going to back up that camera, nuke it, and create a new one and import it. I've had BI get a bit wonky when messing around with too many settings at once.
 
Funny, I was working on this issue just last night. Except mine would sit at it's usual 35-40% then all of the sudden be pegged at 100%.

Rebooting didn't help as it sometimes does. No memory leak. Last stable BI version. Was behind on windows updates, so started that last night before kids' dinner interrupted me as well.

I'll have to check hardware acceleration, but it was at it's usual 20% GPU.

If it persists, I'll have to start logging use better, and figure out if it's random, starts at a certain time, starts with a cleanup task, or at night when there's more motion detection...

Sent from my Pixel XL using Tapatalk
 
I have not heard of anybody before yesterday, that are writing 40 camera's to a USB drive. I wonder if that is bottlenecking something in someway. Is there any possibilities that the USB connection cannot record and playback all that data without some problems?
 
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They may think they are recording 40 cameras to a USB drive, but I bet it cannot keep up even though it is rated for much higher. YMMV

I tried it recently as a test and it wasn't very successful, so I replaced the hard drive with a larger one. I would watch the data through the USB and it would jump to 110mb/s, then would drop to almost zero, then it would time out and then restart, then jump to 120mb/s then down to kb/s. Didn't give me the warm and fuzzy that it could keep up reliably.

But there are folks here that say they use USB drives successfully....as always YMMV.
 
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I have a 2TB USB drive I use for older files I like to keep handy. Doing a full backup, or even a differential, takes a very long time and it's only about half full. I plan on replacing it with another SATA drive in the near future. Then I'll see if I can shuck it and maybe use the drive in SATA mode.
 
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I have one of my junk cameras that goes rainbow, after i do a find/inspect. If I go set the camera make to Generic/onvif it will start working again. BI does detect the camera make correctly, but the remaining settings are crap. I do not use substreams on this POS camera.
 
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Oh yeah I definitely use USB external drives for backing up drive images. and creating folders for "incidents" at the Condo. I recently began bitlockering them in case they get ripped off.
 
I've been alternating between internal (SATA) HDD, NAS, and external USB. I did have a number of clip: disk write errors that happened regardless of which of the three methods I used. Only after upgrading to a 12TB external USB did that error not return. I realize that writing "40 cameras" should bottleneck, but the reality is, not all 40 are ever going to record at the same time. I have situations where the majority are recording (fog/rain/wind) but even then I've not had any issues on this new drive.

That is not to say it'll work for everyone, but it's been flawless so far. The 100% CPU was the result of an update that changed all of my cameras from HWA intel to OFF. After re-enabling it, CPU dropped to 60% - right where it used to be. Thanks to nudges early in this post, I subsequently started using sub-streams on all cameras, and now my CPU is barely hitting 20%.
 
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some of the write errors are caused by over allocation the drive space to BI. if you have 40 cameras writing continuously to a drive I would strongly recommend at least 15% free space.
A screen shot of the BI status clip storage.
================================-
My Standard allocation post.

1) Do not use time (limit clip age)to determine when BI video files are moved or deleted, only use space. Using time wastes disk space.
2) If New and stored are on the same disk drive do not used stored, set the stored size to zero, set the new folder to delete, not move. All it does is waste CPU time and increase the number of disk writes. You can leave the stored folder on the drive just do not use it.
3) Never allocate over 90% of the total disk drive to BI.
4) if using continuous recording on the BI camera settings, record tab, set the combine and cut video to 1 hour or 3 GB. Really big files are difficult to transfer.
5) it is recommend to NOT store video on an SSD (the C: drive).
6) Do not run the disk defragmenter on the video storage disk drives.
7) Do not run virus scanners on BI folders
8) an alternate way to allocate space on multiple drives is to assign different cameras to different drives, so there is no file movement between new and stored.
9) Never use an External USB drive for the NEW folder. Never use a network drive for the NEW folder.


Advanced storage:
If you are using a complete disk for large video file storage (BVR) continuous recording, I recommend formatting the disk, with a windows cluster size of 1024K (1 Megabyte). This is a increase from the 4K default. This will reduce the physical number of disk write, decrease the disk fragmentation, speed up access.
Hint:
On the Blue iris status (lighting bolt graph) clip storage tab, if there is any red on the bars you have a allocation problem. If there is no Green, you have no free space, this is bad.
======================================
 
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These are some really good pointers. I've allocated 10TB of the 12TB drive. I have no write errors since moving to the 12TB external. I have the system alerts set to push notify anytime there is a system error - which includes clip write errors. I've also just scanned the log files and found no errors since the switch.

I've not formatted the drive, so it is using the default cluster size. I am interested in doing the 1MB cluster size, though I don't know what improvements that will yield given the current flawless performance (knock on wood).

Incidentally, one of the things I've asked Ken for over the years, was some kind of fall-back failsafe for when a clip disk becomes inaccessible, or otherwise unusable. For example, if you're writing to drive F, and it fails, or is incorrectly configured and becomes full, BI should have the ability to automatically begin saving data to a (physically different) separate HDD. Seems like a pretty thing to implement.
 
I violate my own rules, more or less :)
I have my critical cameras configured with a clone camera. The clones records to a simple single drive NAS continuously. The clones have no additional processing, no alerts, no motion... they just record. My NAS is inside a gun safe. This has all the critical recordings if the main video drive fails.
 
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erkme73 said:
For example, if you're writing to drive F, and it fails, or is incorrectly configured and becomes full, BI should have the ability to automatically begin saving data to a (physically different) separate HDD. Seems like a pretty thing to implement.
Click to expand...

Use StableBit Drivepool, its pretty much exactly what you are talking about

It just makes a hidden folder on each drive, then presents a virtual drive with the space of all the drives you added, and then you can set it to balance the storage and all sorts of other things
 
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Short version: I had the same problem with 100%. Various cameras would stop allowing hardware acceleration. I would change it and it would not save. I also attempted to set up substreams, and the whole system would bog to being unusable.

I may not have needed to have gone this far, but my solution was to totally wipe BI and start from scratch. I uninstalled it and deleted everything I could find. I re-installed and started with one camera, and found that my substream settings had been fine. An hour or so later, everything was up and running, with configuration saved.

Add the best part is that I am now under 20% CPU with 28 cameras!

I am glad this forum is here, and really appreciate the regulars here. I can't think of a BI issue that I have ever had in 8 years that you fellers didn't already know how to fix it.
 
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