New BI setup - 9 cams; 50% CPU load w/ DTD or Encode on i5

[LTek]

My fast system runs very slow after installing BI

My setup...
i5-4300u, 8 GB ram, 256GB SSD, Win7 laptop
Laptop dedicated to running my media and security.
Nothing installed but Kodi media center (only on when I'm watching a movie), so 99% of the time it is running nothing but BI
7 Samsung 1080p cams running 30fps
2 Foscam 1.3MP cams
All cams run Motion detection in BI with sensitivity reduced lower than the defaults
Recording is only upon motion and I've tried both the default encoding and, now, DTD
BI install is pretty much stock... I'm just learning BI so I've made no real changes.
BI running as a service

My laptop running was super fast in Kodi but sluggish as hell when BI is running - basically unusable

I want to move over from my Synology to BI but the Syno is a 3 year old crappy ATOM running a ton of stuff and runs 10x better than BI on my 500x faster laptop.

What is going on?

thx for the help!

 

[fenderman]

@LTek, welcome to the forum. Blue iris is great, however it requires a powerful pc if you are running many had cams...your laptop is actually very weak compared to modern i5 haswell desktop cpu's. http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i5-4300U+@+1.90GHz
It may be fast for kodi because of the ssd so it loads fast, however blue iris needs raw cpu power. Try lowering your frame rate to 15fps...30 is overkill anyways.

 

[LTek]

Interesting that you say the i5-4300U is weak for BI yet my Synology with an Intel Atom D2700 and only 1 GB RAM is literally 1/5th the benchmark spec (but in reality the laptop is about 10x the speed) yet can easily handle all the cameras at 30fps. while it runs a dozen other apps. BI looks like it was written in the Win95 days ... is the code just old and inefficient so it take way to many resources?

I was running it at 20fps before and didn't see any reduction in CPU usage... and the video motion stuttered a ton more.

 

[fenderman]

Interesting that you say the i5-4300U is weak for BI yet my Synology with an Intel Atom chip literally 1/5th the benchmark spec yet can easily handle all the cameras at 30fps. while it runs a dozen other apps. BI looks like it was written in the Win95 days ... is the code just old and inefficient so it take way to many resources?

NVR's operate with much weaker processors as well. Blue iris does its own on board motion detection and does not use the cameras. Also it analyzes and displays the full hd video not the substreams...This has been a well known issue with blue iris for years. Maybe one day he will implement onvif and improve the cpu consumption. The software is incredibly versatile and VERY cheap. You can either choose to pay 50-150 per license for milestone, exacq etc..or simply buy a 300 dollar i5 haswell optiplex 7020 from the dell outlet store...
As far as the looks, its just fine to me. I would rather the developer focus on new features and improvements than a pretty interface. He pumps out new features and improvements monthly.

 

[LTek]

Yeah, I could buy a dedicated i5 for it, and I might. It would be really nice if he coded the processing to use GPU (Intel's Media SDK) instead of CPU... that would quickly fix the high CPU utilization without the need to change his methods of analysis.

I don't care about the 'look of the app', that is not what i meant. I mean that it seems like maybe the code was old and inefficient... I gathered that conclusion based on the app looking like it is coded and complied using an old version of visual studio... and thus thinking that the code it old and may not be optimized using the latest methods and dev kit optimizations. I could be wrong, maybe it is just that the analysis method is killing the resources.

 

[fenderman]

Yeah, I could buy a dedicated i5 for it, and I might. It would be really nice if he coded the processing to use GPU (Intel's Media SDK) instead of CPU... that would quickly fix the high CPU utilization without the need to change his methods of analysis.

I don't care about the 'look of the app', that is not what i meant. I mean that it seems like maybe the code was old and inefficient... I gathered that conclusion based on the app looking like it is coded and complied using an old version of visual studio... and thus thinking that the code it old and may not be optimized using the latest methods and dev kit optimizations. I could be wrong, maybe it is just that the analysis method is killing the resources.

He knows what hes doing...I think its a priority thing....its really easy to make suggestions but much more difficult to implement them..remember he is one guy doing all the development, support etc..
For me, its a no brainier..I have over 20 blue iris machines running smooth...tons of options, low cost....

 

[bp2008]

Since it is running on a laptop, I have to ask, are you connecting it with wifi? You definitely want to have it wired, not wireless, for Blue Iris.

Also, if you see no CPU performance difference between 20 FPS and 30 FPS then you are doing it wrong. Frame rates need to be changed in the web interface of the camera, not in Blue Iris. There should be a tremendous difference in CPU usage once you drop down from 30 to, say, 15 FPS. Look at this video, which compares frame rates for security cameras. You should notice that while 15 FPS is not as buttery smooth as 30 FPS, it is more than smooth enough for security cameras.


Anyway, the reason Blue Iris uses a ton of CPU time where other NVRs (like your Synology system) do not, is that Blue Iris decodes all incoming video streams while those NVRs do not. This allows Blue Iris to do its own motion detection, and transcode the video streams for playback through its web interface and mobile apps. I agree, Blue Iris could probably decode (and re-encode) the video streams more efficiently. It could even give you an option to use a sub stream for motion detection and live view, only keeping the main stream for recordings, and the result would be a huge CPU usage savings without sacrificing any recording quality. But Blue Iris is developed and supported by just one guy whereas pretty much all of the competition has an entire development team.

 

[LTek]

bp2008
I'll try setting the in-camera frame rate lower and see if that helps - good suggestion, thank you

The core of the problem is it seems BI is not timeslicing well... not playing nice with other apps. Even at 50% CPU, when it is recording or not... Kodi is unusable. This seems to point to an app that is hogging not only resources but not allowing other apps their fair share of the interrupts for memory and/or CPU ... but I'm guessing here, no expert, just seen this before with other apps and it was that the app was hogging prioritization unnecessarily.

 

[ruppmeister]

I use Blue Iris on a home server that is currently doubling as a HTPC and I have no problems at all. In fact, I run BI, Plex Server (for chromecast devices), Kodi, FTP server, NetTime, and a number of other things from the same machine at the same time and don't have unusable problems with any of it. My processor sits between 30% - 50% normal.

I am guessing you have something else going on here.

 

[LTek]

I lowered the frame rate in BI to 15fps on all 9 cams...CPU utilization floats between 25-32% now AND using ~1.4GB RAM. Maybe the RAM is the issue, not the CPU?

Pretty sure there is a problem with the BI process, here's why:
- I run BI as a service... watching the process in Task Manager, shows 0% CPU utilization.
- When I open BI's interface, CPU floats between 25-32%
- With BI running, as a service... I open Kodi v15, Kodi is very sluggish and slow to respond, hangs often. Not usable at all.
- When I keep Kodi running an then kill all the BI processes Kodi returns to completely smooth operation.

I'm going to try disabling cams, one at a time, to see where BI stops causing Kodi problems. I still suspect there is something like BI process being such a high priority in CPU scheduling that is it not releasing cycles for other apps.

Are you guys running BI 'as a Service' or as a User App and if User App - with or without admin privs?

@Rupp: what is your BI setup? How many cams, what FPS, when does it record (always, on motion, etc)?

thx for helping!

 

[ruppmeister]

I am running on a late 2012 Mac mini i5, 16GB ram, OS on SSD running Win 10 currently. I have 5 cams pushing about 7 total megapixels with CPU fluctuations between 30% and 50%.

I don't notice any significant RAM usage like you as my BI sits around 500MB. There is no reason I would need more than maybe 8 GB of RAM to be honest. Most of it never gets used at all, not even for pre-caching of apps.


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[LTek]

I wonder if there is a memory leak in the 64bit version... maybe I should move to the 32 bit

 

[fenderman]

I wonder if there is a memory leak in the 64bit version... maybe I should move to the 32 bit

You ram usage seems normal... Why do you suspect a memory leak?


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[ruppmeister]

I highly doubt memory leak. And I am using 64 bit no problem.


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[Zorac]

are kodi and blueiris sharing a hard drive? getting your cpu down to 35% to 30% seems about right for the cameras your running. i have a drive dedicated to bi as i can't really use that drive for anything else because of lagging issue.

i agree with the others, that ram usage is not unreasonable, most are using the 64bit version with out any evidence of a memory leak. even as a service BI should be using cpu cycles without the interface, something doesn't seem right there.

 

[LTek]

are kodi and blueiris sharing a hard drive? getting your cpu down to 35% to 30% seems about right for the cameras your running. i have a drive dedicated to bi as i can't really use that drive for anything else because of lagging issue.

i agree with the others, that ram usage is not unreasonable, most are using the 64bit version with out any evidence of a memory leak. even as a service BI should be using cpu cycles without the interface, something doesn't seem right there.

I moved all my cams to 15fps and CPU has dropped to 25% BUT I still see MASSIVE lag and hangs with Kodi.
I run an SSD in that computer. I'd be surprised if the hangs/lag I see in Kodi are related to a hard drive bottleneck... this is more indicative of a memory and cpu priority issue. E.g. BI is hogging all the interrupts.

I really like BI but it seems like it poorly coded. I work with professional video (delivery/transcoding/etc) companies and this app should not be anywhere near difficult to run on my i5 PC.

 

[fenderman]

I moved all my cams to 15fps and CPU has dropped to 25% BUT I still see MASSIVE lag and hangs with Kodi.
I run an SSD in that computer. I'd be surprised if the hangs/lag I see in Kodi are related to a hard drive bottleneck... this is more indicative of a memory and cpu priority issue. E.g. BI is hogging all the interrupts.

I really like BI but it seems like it poorly coded. I work with professional video (delivery/transcoding/etc) companies and this app should not be anywhere near difficult to run on my i5 PC.

The solution is to run blue iris on a clean machine with no other software running (as should be the case with every other vms machine). If you insist on multitasking with this machine consider the plethora of other vms options out there, maybe they will interact better with kodi.
You can also contact tech support and see if he can resolve your issue.

 

[techology]

I found a few different issue's when i first setup my system.
My Mistakes
-Was on wifi
-was recording to slow USB drive
-had to many camera's
I changed the above and still have some problems with my setup. My normal setup running smooth is 30fps, and about 500-600KB/sec (data from ip camera's) is when everything is smooth. I recently changed to DTD and thought that would be my final fix. But i still have issue's with the FPS dropping to like 7-12. I'm not fully understanding why, have any input? I even tried switching from USB3 drive to onboard (sata) 1TB drive and issue was still there....

PC specs: AMD a10-5700, 10gig RAM, 120SSD OS drive Win 7 SP1, recording to USB3 2TB drive...CPU is between 10-25% with normal operation...
Cams - 3 hikvision 3MP set to 30fps (due to how wide of an area i'm covering)

 

[bp2008]

I found a few different issue's when i first setup my system.
My Mistakes
-Was on wifi
-was recording to slow USB drive
-had to many camera's
I changed the above and still have some problems with my setup. My normal setup running smooth is 30fps, and about 500-600KB/sec (data from ip camera's) is when everything is smooth. I recently changed to DTD and thought that would be my final fix. But i still have issue's with the FPS dropping to like 7-12. I'm not fully understanding why, have any input? I even tried switching from USB3 drive to onboard (sata) 1TB drive and issue was still there....

PC specs: AMD a10-5700, 10gig RAM, 120SSD OS drive Win 7 SP1, recording to USB3 2TB drive...CPU is between 10-25% with normal operation...
Cams - 3 hikvision 3MP set to 30fps (due to how wide of an area i'm covering)

Is the FPS dropping in the live view, or only in recordings?

Are you streaming h264 or mjpeg?

 

[techology]

Is the FPS dropping in the live view, or only in recordings?

Are you streaming h264 or mjpeg?

The FPS is dropping in both, i'm assuming the stream is h264. That's the feed setup in the cam, i recently changed it back from DTD to Re-encode to H264 and so far it hasn't gone back to what it was. I'm trying to remember what else i changed. I thought DTD would of helped because it wasnt encoding the video as recording and displaying it....