Blue iris iOS app used 95gb of data last month, it cost $1500 - was not running in background

Marshall

Marshall

n3wb
Jan 30, 2018
22
2
I'm pretty upset at the moment. It appears blue iris consumed 95gb of data @ $15/gb from verizon on my iPhone last month over cellular. No I did not leave the app running in the background consistently. Why did this app do this? It is a new iphone 13, that I restored a backup transfer from my old iPhone 11 to.

Does anyone have any idea why this would cause this? I was thinking it could have been transferring all the historical clips from the server since this was a new phone but I went to iOS device storage to see how much space the app actually consumed and it is only using 34mb of data, so that wouldn't be the case.

Clearly this is a glitch in the application, and a very costly one for consumers. I would strongly advise everyone check their cellular data usage in the iOS settings.
 
That is worrying. I thought iOS aggressively shuts down apps that try to run for very long in the background. There's copious documentation about that. So I have no idea how it could stream so much video without you knowing.

The only bandwidth-intensive thing the Blue Iris apps do is stream video which is supposed to only happen when you are watching it. The app does not transfer clips in the background. Clip playback is actually done just like live streaming, except using the clip as the video source. There is no significant buffering ahead or preloading of any kind.

Blue Iris's default bit rate limit for web server streaming is I think 512 Kbps. At that rate it would take about 17 continuous days of streaming to hit 95 GB (although it is possible for your streaming bit rate to be anything, you can check on that in BI settings > Web Server > advanced, where you can view and edit the streaming profiles. And in the IOS app settings it should be possible to choose between the streaming profiles.

If you have BI save log events to a file (BI status window > log tab) then you can look at all the web server's login and logout events. There's also the BI status window > Connections tab for real-time monitoring of web server connections.
 
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I have reset the app usage under cellular in iOS settings to keep track and see if it's still doing this.
 
Make sure settings, general, Background App Refresh is not turned on on the Iphone.
 
Sure enough, I just reset my cellular data, cut wifi off, and within 5 minutes or so BI had 17mb of data used. The amount of data would go up after each push notification received. I do have GIF enabled, or maybe it's called "rich" in the settings to where there are a few frames of the trigger. How would this cause that and how can this be fixed?

Background app refresh is on, but this is on by default for everyone, so that should not be the problem.
 
I have no idea how big the GIFs are. Is there a way to find out? I don't use mobile push so I really have no clue.

But lets assume they are truly insanely inefficient and they are a full megabyte each (LOL that would be so awful). Even at that inflated size it would require 95,000 push notifications within the month. In other words one notification every 28 seconds, 24 hours a day, for a month.

Look at the BI status > Connections and make sure nothing is connected and streaming video?
 
Per the connection status, my phone is connected and appears to be continually connected. I swiped up to see what apps are open, and BI is indeed closed. Push notifications are coming in as they should.

This is starting to make sense why I thought my brand new iphone battery life sucked... guess it wasnt the battery draining it.
 
Right around this same time I guess this data started getting sucked up, I added a remote BI server with 2 cameras. I can't imagine this would be the trigger on this unless it's a serious bug. It's paired within the BI App, but shouldnt have anything to do with my phone.
 
Marshall said:
Per the connection status, my phone is connected and appears to be continually connected. I swiped up to see what apps are open, and BI is indeed closed. Push notifications are coming in as they should.
Click to expand...

Is there a value in the kbps column? If it is blank and the Frames column is unchanging, that means video is not being streamed.


Regarding the GIF alerts, I looked at the settings for this:

1653512904942.png

That is not promising. GIFs have horrible compression for photo/video content. A GIF of a photo around 960x480 size is roughly 250 KB. For one frame. If BI produces 10 frames (as stated in the help file) at this size then you could expect each notification to consume 2.5 MB unless some very careful color manipulation is done to smooth over all the details so it can compress better. So 38,000 notifications would be 95 GB. About one notification every 69 seconds. That is still an absurdly large number of notifications you'd have to be receiving.
 
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