The large orange clock icon that appears and disappears?

Owkaye

Owkaye

Young grasshopper
Jun 5, 2019
30
4
Biloxi MS USA
A large orange clock icon appears at the top right on my UI3 screen sometimes. I tried but failed to find a reference to it in the 'Help' PDF file. Can someone tell me why it pops up occasionally, and then disappears after a while? It indicates some kind of problem, correct?
 
This happens when the UI3 frame rate drops low. Notice that the FPS in the lower left corner is low or zero.
 
I see. So is this related to a network slowdown? Or a server slowdown? Or is it impossible to tell which is causing the slowdown?
 
Owkaye said:
I see. So is this related to a network slowdown? Or a server slowdown? Or is it impossible to tell which is causing the slowdown?
Click to expand...

In the lower left corner are your servers stats. Unless the MEM or CPU are maxed out, it's probably network/internet issues. It will also hang (show the clock) if the clip is damaged.
 
That icon indicates your video stream is delayed. There are two causes for stream delay.

1) The stream may not be coming in fast enough, indicating either network or BI server trouble.
2) The stream may not be playing fast enough, indicating your device running UI3 is having a problem (or maybe it is just slow).

If you click on that icon a message should appear explaining which of the two situations it is. That message used to appear instead of the icon, but a bunch of people complained that it was too annoying so now you have the icon instead.
 
bp2008 said:
If you click on that icon a message should appear explaining which of the two situations it is. That message used to appear instead of the icon, but a bunch of people complained that it was too annoying so now you have the icon instead.
Click to expand...

It never occurred to me that it was a clickable icon. I can't be the only idget in the world. (Hope not!) Maybe make it obvious? Like have a pointer icon click it or something?

I'm looking forward to clicking it next time I see it, just to see what it's diagnosis is :)

Everyone I've shown UI3 to has been very impressed. Great work :)
 
2) The stream may not be playing fast enough, indicating your device running UI3 is having a problem (or maybe it is just slow).
Click to expand...

I can sometimes make the icon appear if I set my playback speed high enough, or at least I think I made the icon appear by doing this one time.

I'll click the icon the next time it appears, thanks bp2008.
 
Anyone notice that the clock icon appears at midnight just about every night? I am thinking its something to do with NTP time sync. It always says due to network speed, which I find highly improbable my home network slows down just at midnight enough to effect the local stream. The main thing is that each one of my displays are running on Raspberry Pi's running chromium with UI3.
 
I haven't seen that happen.

NTP sync on the pi shouldn't affect it at all. UI3 does most timing-related things like determining network delay by using performance.now() in JavaScript, which is a timing source that is supposed to not be affected by clock changes.

Also I find it unlikely that NTP sync is done exactly at midnight every night. Such scheduling if done on a large scale would cause load spikes for NTP servers.

I would not expect Blue Iris to use a time source that is dependent on wall-clock time either, but I suppose it is a possibility.
 
Doesn't BI just use computer system time?
 
In software engineering we have other ways to measure the passage of time that don't jump ahead or go backwards unpredictably like the clock in the corner of your display can.
 
Well back to the drawing board I suppose. Just not sure what else would occur at midnight every night that affects all 3 of my pi displays at the exact same time, and now that I think about it, my home automation server that I also use to display UI3 in brave sees the problem too. Refreshing the page always clears it up, and sometimes, it does eventually go away on its own (rarely).
 
jcbbas said:
Well back to the drawing board I suppose. Just not sure what else would occur at midnight every night that affects all 3 of my pi displays at the exact same time, and now that I think about it, my home automation server that I also use to display UI3 in brave sees the problem too. Refreshing the page always clears it up, and sometimes, it does eventually go away on its own (rarely).
Click to expand...
So, looks like I can somewhat reproduce this. If I change the system time of the blue iris server, the icons pop up on all the screens. The NTP sync on the blue iris server does occur at midnight based on the events listed in the system log.

Edit: Midnight weekly. Maybe if I schedule it to occur more often there wont be so much time drift and I wont see the icons pop up. I guess it could be only happening Saturday night as that is the night I am typically up later through the week. Looking at event message, it doesn't seem to be crazy different.

"The system time has changed to ‎2020‎-‎05‎-‎17T04:00:05.056287100Z from ‎2020‎-‎05‎-‎17T04:00:05.055287700Z."
 
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Do you use a local NTP server to get the time from for all your network devices ?
Use

do you update the time on your system every few hours. Updated at midnight may cause problems, Time jumps back and you pass through the day change twice, not good.

Your time change is after midnight and is only 0.1 seconds.
 
SouthernYankee said:
Do you use a local NTP server to get the time from for all your network devices ?
Use

do you update the time on your system every few hours. Updated at midnight may cause problems, Time jumps back and you pass through the day change twice, not good.

Your time change is after midnight and is only 0.1 seconds.
Click to expand...
That I do, my home automation server also runs an NTP server that I have all my cameras, PC's and devices synced up with. Good point on the update at midnight. Ill move it to 1:00 AM to avoid the potential to jump days. Like you said, its only .1 seconds so I am surprised I get the clock icon due to that short of a difference.
 
It only went back by one millisecond in your quoted event. That is well within the expected margin of error on a network time sync. See if you can notice any kind of pause or hiccup in the video stream at midnight, if you think of it. I am rarely up that late.
 
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