UI3 slow even crashing my NVR PC

[Afranze]

Hi

Ive been running BI on this below PC ( refurbed Dell optiplex) for about a year. No problems untill recently. I typically view the UI from a laptop in our kitchen but sometimes my work PC in my office. When navigiating around the UI and viewing clips and alerts I find it very slow and it will also hang with a orange clock symbol. I have 7 cameras installed 2 which are 4k but I run sub-streams with them.
I recently added an 8th camera thats 4k and thats when it got worse. When I click around to navigate clips it will often crash the PC I am running BI from. I cant even remote to it when its crashed and I have to do a hard reset with the reset button
I've had to disable the new camera for now so it at least wont crash but its still painfully slow

What things can I do to resolve this? I am running the clips as Direct to Disk on all and its a network HDD
Would 8 camera's be pushing the spindle disk too far? Or is something else wrong here?

What other info would you need if someone can give me some advice that would be fantastic. Oh and I also have my storage set up this way:
I dont move any storage I just have a new folder and its set to delete when gets to the storage limit



Version: Release 5.9.9.21 x64 (15/01/2025)
OS: Windows 11 Pro
CPU,GPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8700 CPU @ 3.20GHz [64%,1%]
RAM: 1.27GB/31.8GB
Clips: 1613 items, 3717/5351GB
Storage: D: +252.6GB, C: +288.9GB

 

[wittaj]

You should be fine. Make sure you are using H264 for all your cameras.

In UI3, under UI Settings, go to VideoPlayer and change to JavaScript and see if that fixes it.

 

[Afranze]

You should be fine. Make sure you are using H264 for all your cameras.

In UI3, under UI Settings, go to VideoPlayer and change to JavaScript and see if that fixes it.

Thanks I changed it. Will monitor

It was going ok for most of the day when it started behaviing again the way just before the whole PC crashes

Gets stuck on loading last event and then cant load any events:

 

[bp2008]

It sounds like your BI server may be having a hardware problem if putting it under a heavy load causes the machine to crash. Do you have a monitor hooked up to so you can see what it is doing when you can't remote in? That will be key. You can't collect much information for diagnostic purposes if you can't access the desktop anymore.

Have you tried monitoring the CPU temperature with a program like Core Temp? If the CPU spends much time at a temperature very near or above its "Tj. Max", that would be a sign of poor cooling which over time could cause damage.

https://www.alcpu.com/CoreTemp/CoreTemp64.zip

What is the BI machine's CPU usage at normally when you are using UI3? Your support info text in the first post shows 64% which is rather high for 8 cameras on that CPU, and indicates you could probably do more to optimize CPU usage. But that shouldn't crash it, and 64% CPU usage isn't really high enough to cause streaming delays.

Something that could potentially be related is hardware accelerated decoding. Make sure that is turned off in Blue Iris globally in BI Settings > Cameras > Hardware accelerated decode. For each camera it should be set to Default or No (Camera settings > Video > Hardware decode). When you change the hardware acceleration option in the main BI settings, each camera that is set to "Default" needs restarted for the global change to take effect.

The nuclear option would be to reinstall Windows and Blue Iris on there from scratch to rule out any software configuration issues.

 

[bp2008]

8 cameras is definitely not too much for any properly functioning hard drive. Having it be a network drive would, I think, make it less likely for disk hardware problems to affect the stability and reachability of the BI server machine. In theory the only thing that should be affected by a failure of your network share would be the Blue Iris software itself. Remote access to the BI machine would continue working fine.

 

[Afranze]

It sounds like your BI server may be having a hardware problem if putting it under a heavy load causes the machine to crash. Do you have a monitor hooked up to so you can see what it is doing when you can't remote in? That will be key. You can't collect much information for diagnostic purposes if you can't access the desktop anymore.

Have you tried monitoring the CPU temperature with a program like Core Temp? If the CPU spends much time at a temperature very near or above its "Tj. Max", that would be a sign of poor cooling which over time could cause damage.

https://www.alcpu.com/CoreTemp/CoreTemp64.zip

What is the BI machine's CPU usage at normally when you are using UI3? Your support info text in the first post shows 64% which is rather high for 8 cameras on that CPU, and indicates you could probably do more to optimize CPU usage. But that shouldn't crash it, and 64% CPU usage isn't really high enough to cause streaming delays.

Something that could potentially be related is hardware accelerated decoding. Make sure that is turned off in Blue Iris globally in BI Settings > Cameras > Hardware accelerated decode. For each camera it should be set to Default or No (Camera settings > Video > Hardware decode). When you change the hardware acceleration option in the main BI settings, each camera that is set to "Default" needs restarted for the global change to take effect.

The nuclear option would be to reinstall Windows and Blue Iris on there from scratch to rule out any software configuration issues.

Hi
Sorry for the late reply we went on vacation.

No its keyboardless but I can do that
I have UI3 open right now and remoted into the PC that runs BI. Here is a screenshot of the CPU temp so around 90 deg when playing a clip and it goes back down to around 75 deg C when just live viewing


CPU % usage from looking at task manager:
15-20% total usage when just live view running
25-30% usage when playing an alert. It just spikes to about 90% but just for a second

Checked global decond settings and its set to NO
Checked each camera hardware decode an its set to default

 

[bp2008]

Well the CPU temperature is not great, but it isn't like it is spending most of its time at 100°C either so it could be worse. I'm not going to rule out heat related damage over the entire life of the system (i7-8700 is pretty old at this point).

Having Blue Iris's CPU usage spiking briefly all the way from 30% to 90% on a 6 core 12 thread CPU is really strange. Makes me wonder if it might actually just be the CPU hitting its thermal limit and underclocking itself to reduce temperature, causing the existing workload to take more time.

Also, I wouldn't expect alert playback to use more CPU than live view. If anything I'd expect alert playback to cause lower CPU usage because live view often means multiple cameras at once, which is more complex rendering work for Blue Iris.

Something funny is definitely going on. I am just not sure what.

 

[Afranze]

Well the CPU temperature is not great, but it isn't like it is spending most of its time at 100°C either so it could be worse. I'm not going to rule out heat related damage over the entire life of the system (i7-8700 is pretty old at this point).

Having Blue Iris's CPU usage spiking briefly all the way from 30% to 90% on a 6 core 12 thread CPU is really strange. Makes me wonder if it might actually just be the CPU hitting its thermal limit and underclocking itself to reduce temperature, causing the existing workload to take more time.

Also, I wouldn't expect alert playback to use more CPU than live view. If anything I'd expect alert playback to cause lower CPU usage because live view often means multiple cameras at once, which is more complex rendering work for Blue Iris.

Something funny is definitely going on. I am just not sure what.

It's a weird one

I just deleted all clips and alerts and it's been ok so far

Will keep an eye on it