CPU Maxing Out... Help Diagnosing

[mrfrankmrfrank]

Hello all, a few years back I built a system for a friend's auto shop. I did my best to budget / vs performance. At the time he had this system connected to a 1080p monitor and had approximately 3 less cameras than he does now. We struggled early on with hard drive storage configurations as I was trying to best utilize several 3tb drives from his previous system. Ultimately we currently write direct to disk to a 3tb... potentially blue-ish type drive... definitely not a wd purple for example. The system seemed mostly stable for a couple of years... but recently we have had the cpu maxing out and laggy playback.

The cpu is an Intel Core I7 6700k at 4ghz with 16 gb ram.

9 cameras at 3.1 MP
2 cameras at 4.1 MP
6 cameras at 3.7 MP

The cameras status page of BI shows 7782.25 kB/s at 886 MP/s.

For several months now we have had issues where the cpu ultimately climbs to 100% and review and playback of footage is laggy. The display screen was upgraded to 4k at some point and the resolution up until today was set to 4096 x2160. Today in an effort to lower cpu utilization I set the display to 1080p.

Lastly, in an effort to reduce cpu load we installed a 1070 for the sake of using nvidia encoding which I have set to most if not all of the cameras... however when the bi gui is still full screen it seems to jump the cpu usage from 40 to 90 plus. If the console is closed the cpu stays below 50

I am able to provide further details I may have missed. I am not sitting in front of the system currently and can retrieve info as needed. Thank you for the help.

 

[gwminor48]

Any Windows or Blue Iris updates recently?

 

[mrfrankmrfrank]

I've typically upgraded windows whenever I get into the system... this issue has occured across mutliple windows updates... we are on blue iris version 4.x though... not sure if we should go to 5x... I figured the issue was more related to configuration.

 

[Peter Myers]

i hate updates... i had that same issue.. but mine was resolved with setting up sub streams with the cameras.. i have 16 4k cameras.. and after the 3rd camera was added i was getting lag the whole computer just the same... and i have an i9-9900k, 64G of ram and 5 12TB WB Purples in RAID..... w/e cant remember atm.. but yeah... the sub streams really did a number...

 

[gwminor48]

Are these cameras able to take advantages of quicksync or hw acceleration? I presume you already went through all the optimization steps when you first set things up.

 

[mrfrankmrfrank]

I am decoding h264 through the nvidia acceleration on an gtx 1070

 

[bp2008]

If sounds like you are already running about 15 FPS on all the cams, so good work there.

Nvidia acceleration is a lot more power-hungry than Intel acceleration, so really you should be using Intel acceleration.

Keep the monitor connected to the nvidia card though, because that should reduce CPU usage caused by the GUI being open. Also in Blue Iris Options > Cameras tab, check the box to limit live preview rate and set a limit of like 10 for FPS. You can adjust this up and down however it suits you, but it is your main control of how much CPU the GUI will demand.

If you upgrade to Blue Iris 5 then you can configure sub streams on the cams that you run at a higher resolution and frame rate, and that will help an incredible amount. Just be aware that some configuration choices are lost when you upgrade to BI 5 (profile-specific configuration mainly). And when you configure a camera to use a sub stream, you also lose any motion zones you configured before.

 

[mrfrankmrfrank]

If sounds like you are already running about 15 FPS on all the cams, so good work there.

Nvidia acceleration is a lot more power-hungry than Intel acceleration, so really you should be using Intel acceleration.

Keep the monitor connected to the nvidia card though, because that should reduce CPU usage caused by the GUI being open. Also in Blue Iris Options > Cameras tab, check the box to limit live preview rate and set a limit of like 10 for FPS. You can adjust this up and down however it suits you, but it is your main control of how much CPU the GUI will demand.

If you upgrade to Blue Iris 5 then you can configure sub streams on the cams that you run at a higher resolution and frame rate, and that will help an incredible amount. Just be aware that some configuration choices are lost when you upgrade to BI 5 (profile-specific configuration mainly). And when you configure a camera to use a sub stream, you also lose any motion zones you configured before.

With regards to power-hungry... are you literally referring to watts the system is using? I can easily reconfigure the cameras to use the intel acceleration.. I think my thought process was since the cpu was already high utilization, offloading to the gpu would free it up, but yet I'm still having issues.

I suppose I can google the benefit of the sub-stream but I'd assume it was for preview purposes while recording higher resolution? If that is the case we are doing both recording 24/7 and doing motion alerts. Would the sub streams still provide a benefit in this case?

Thank you for the time / help.

 

[biggen]

I suppose I can google the benefit of the sub-stream but I'd assume it was for preview purposes while recording higher resolution? If that is the case we are doing both recording 24/7 and doing motion alerts. Would the sub streams still provide a benefit in this case?

Thank you for the time / help.

Enabling substreams will help tremendously. In grid view, you will see the lowest quality stream but BI will be laying track of the high quality stream for playback. Barely any processing power is used this way.

You definitely need to take advantage of this if your cameras are capable of it.

 

[mrfrankmrfrank]

Enabling substreams will help tremendously. In grid view, you will see the lowest quality stream but BI will be laying track of the high quality stream for playback. Barely any processing power is used this way.

You definitely need to take advantage of this if your cameras are capable of it.

Thank you, I believe most of them are capable of substreams, will investigate thank you.

 

[Dudleydogg]

If you change the Hardware Accel under Cameras in main settings do you still need to go to each individual camera and change or leave them to Default ?

 

[SouthernYankee]

Sub stream is available in a later version 5. Not in version 4.

Screen shots of the
BI camera status page
BI status clip storage.
Windows task manager process tab sorted by memory (most at the top), Must contain, memory, disk, network, GPU, GPU engine columns

I run a slower processor and with more MP/SEC at a much lower CPU than that.

No camera at more than 15 FPS, this is set in the camera
Do not run the disk defragmenter on the video storage disk drives.
Do not run virus scanners on BI folders

Compare what your CPU is doing to similar cpus

Blue Iris Update Helper

Blue Iris Update Helper

biupdatehelper.hopto.org

I thisn this can be used on V4

Optimizing Blue Iris's CPU Usage

Blue Iris uses a lot of CPU time. In most Blue Iris installations, your CPU is the limiting factor which determines how many cameras you can have. As such, it is extremely important to optimize your configuration to ensure you can get the most out of your system while consuming the least...

ipcamtalk.com

 

[mrfrankmrfrank]

Sub stream is available in a later version 5. Not in version 4.

Screen shots of the
BI camera status page
BI status clip storage.
Windows task manager process tab sorted by memory (most at the top), Must contain, memory, disk, network, GPU, GPU engine columns

I run a slower processor and with more MP/SEC at a much lower CPU than that.

No camera at more than 15 FPS, this is set in the camera
Do not run the disk defragmenter on the video storage disk drives.
Do not run virus scanners on BI folders

Compare what your CPU is doing to similar cpus

Blue Iris Update Helper

Blue Iris Update Helper

biupdatehelper.hopto.org

I thisn this can be used on V4

Optimizing Blue Iris's CPU Usage

Blue Iris uses a lot of CPU time. In most Blue Iris installations, your CPU is the limiting factor which determines how many cameras you can have. As such, it is extremely important to optimize your configuration to ensure you can get the most out of your system while consuming the least...

ipcamtalk.com

I have attached the screenshots... you can see a process list with the attached monitor at 1080p and then at 4k. There is a significant increase with the monitor at 4k...

 

[IAmATeaf]

If you change the Hardware Accel under Cameras in main settings do you still need to go to each individual camera and change or leave them to Default ?

If you have changed it individually on each cam then yes you will.

 

[Dudleydogg]

what is best method leave them all at default and just change in main settings ?

 

[looney2ns]

what is best method leave them all at default and just change in main settings ?

Yes.

 

[SouthernYankee]

screen shot of the BI about tab
Two screen shots for your two biggest camera properties the video tab.


Observation When on the 4k Monitor the CPU is higher and the GPU is lower than on the 1080P.

When on the 4K monitor are you looking at one camera or a Group of cameras.
Why does the BI camera status not show the frame rate and the key values ?
Are you driving the monitor off of the pc hdmi or off nvidia gtx 1070 card ?


This is not the cause of your problem but the I: should have at least a 100GB free (green) , never allocate a full drive space to BI leave 5-10% completely free.

======================
Private ip addresses. Local IP addresses. These addresses are NOT used by the internet. They are for your local home/business network.
10.0.0.0 to 10.255.255.255
172.16.0.0 to 172.31.255.255
192.168.0.0 to 192.168.255.255
Note there is no reason to redact local ip addresses when posting.

 

[mrfrankmrfrank]

screen shot of the BI about tab
Two screen shots for your two biggest camera properties the video tab.


Observation When on the 4k Monitor the CPU is higher and the GPU is lower than on the 1080P.

When on the 4K monitor are you looking at one camera or a Group of cameras.
Why does the BI camera status not show the frame rate and the key values ?
Are you driving the monitor off of the pc hdmi or off nvidia gtx 1070 card ?


This is not the cause of your problem but the I: should have at least a 100GB free (green) , never allocate a full drive space to BI leave 5-10% completely free.

======================
Private ip addresses. Local IP addresses. These addresses are NOT used by the internet. They are for your local home/business network.
10.0.0.0 to 10.255.255.255
172.16.0.0 to 172.31.255.255
192.168.0.0 to 192.168.255.255
Note there is no reason to redact local ip addresses when posting.

I didn't realize there were columns to the right on the camera status page. I have corrected the screenshot.
When viewing on the display... it is configured to show all cameras as this is how the user prefers.
The monitor is connected via hdmi to the 1070

 

[SouthernYankee]

Are suggested above, split the processing of the video, Put the video processing on the intel processor and put the display on the nvidia gtx 1070 card.

Your setting look good 15 FPS and an Iframe of 15.

Just remember that the 4K has 4 times the amount of data to process as 1080P. There is a lot of video scaling to get 16 cameras on a 4K monitor.

If time and risk allows I would upgrade to the last stable version of BI 5. This will allow using sub-streams for motion processing, also Sub-streams for the small video images on the combined screen.

I would try set on the system camera tab "limit live preview rate" to a lower number, I use a value of 5, but this many be low for some users.

 

[DICKNLA]

i would also suggest we all pay for current support. We like the blue iris programs and paying 60 a year isn't much to help keep him around