UI3 repeated timeouts with BI 5

[ptzguy]

I upgraded BI from v4 to v5 a few weeks ago. I like the new interface and nearly everything seems to be working, but I'm getting repeated timeouts using remote access from UI3. I've been using UI3 with v4 since it was released and rarely have had a problem with timeouts. I can't think of anything else that changed other than going from BI v4 to v5. This happens locally over the LAN and remotely via internet access. I used to run 1080p frame rate on UI3 with no problems. Now I can barely run 720p.

Symptom: within a few minutes of logging in with UI3, an orange clock face appears in the upper right corner of the screen. All of the camera windows freeze. After one minute, UI3 displays a yellow message box at the lower right corner of the screen and does some sort of reset. The cameras come back live. Repeat forever...

I run about 20 cameras and use UI3 to view a window of 4 to 9 cameras from one of several laptops around the house. I'm retired, and most of the time have an active Ui3 screen nearby if I'm not in my shop with the main BI console. Usually, only one UI3 session is running at a time. The timeouts seem to be more frequent (every 2-3 mins) on the least powerful laptop and less frequent (every 20-30 mins?) on more powerful i5 laptops.

The BI console is a HP i7 laptop. Most of the cameras are 1080P running at 5fps. The main (4) cameras are 4MP at 10fps.

I'm at a loss for how to fix it at this point. Any ideas?

 

[ptzguy]

A few more thoughts...

All of the cameras are triggered only by motion detection. During the day, usually only 1 to 4 cameras are recording at any time, and only for 15-30 secs per trigger typically. At night, triggers are rare, but the timeouts still occur.

The baseline CPU usage for BI5 seems to run 10-15% higher than I was seeing with BI4. Even so, I'm typically running below 70% CPU during the day around 50% at night.

 

[ptzguy]

Well, since no one replied to my original post, I concluded that it was likely a situation that was unique to my setup and not commonly seen.

After much more troubleshooting, I narrowed it down to the Ethernet card on my server PC. I updated the driver, but no luck.

I happened to have another PC with an i7 processor that was available to do some testing. I installed BI5 on the 2nd PC and ported over all of the config settings. After a few minutes to get things straight with Windows firewall, I had BI5 up and running. After several hours of running, I have seen no evidence of the problem recurring. On the original server PC, watching Ethernet performance on Task Manager, I could see the signal drop out every few minutes.

Interestingly, the new PC does not have an Ethernet port, so I'm running 20 cameras through a WiFi connection to the Verizon FioS router. The server is located within a few feet of the router, so I'm getting a very strong 5G signal. It is running at a steady 34Mbps out of 54Mbps. I don't like the idea of running cameras over WiFi, but this is a temporary setup and all the cameras are outdoors, so there's nothing really private to be seen.

I still don't know what the root problem is on the original server PC, but now that I have a backup in operation, I think I'll do a full Win 10 (Pro) re-install and see if the problem goes away.

 

[looney2ns]

Laptops are a poor choice to run BI server on for many reasons.
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