After running fine for an hour or so, BI loses connections to cameras one by one

[oaklandriviera]

I've been running BI5 for nearly a decade. 13 cameras. It's been totally reliable until a couple of weeks ago when, an hour or two after a restart, cameras drop out one by one with a "no signal... failed to connect" error displayed on each camera's window. Restarting BI gets it running again but again after an hour or so it begins to lose the cameras.

The computer is a PC running 64-bit Windows 10. Intel Core i5-9600K CPU @ 3.70GHz. Graphics = Intel UHD Graphics 630 NVIDIA, GeForce RTX 2060 graphics card. Disk is 465 GB, about 2/3 full. Network is trouble-free.

CPU is pinned at 100% with BI using 85%... seems high. Could that be a hint?

Cameras all have static IPs. All powered by PoE. I can login to each camera though Live View doesn't work in my browsers; browsers say a plugin is needed but clicking the link gets an "insecure, download blocked" message.

Hoping an upgrade to BI6 would no longer lose connections to cameras, I purchased and installed that. Alas, same behavior.

Any suggestions on how to fix those lost camera connections?

Many thanks!
Dan

 

[Bruce_H]

Can you get the camera connections back by running the "Find/Inspect" again for the camera. When the camera connection is lost can you still get to the camera login page using the IP of the camera in your browser?

By any chance do you have the "Skip initial MACV.HTTP,DNS reachability test" checked off on the camera configuration page? What about the "Send RTSP keep alive" setting? Those are the two things that I can think of that might be causing you problems, I am sure others may have different suggestions.

The issue with the insecure download is due to the age of the addin that is needed to display the video, the addin would likely only work in EDGE when it is running in IE compatibility mode.

You could also run the hidden version of IE with this command [CreateObject("InternetExplorer.Application").Visible=true], just open notepad and past the text between the square brackets and save the file as "InternetExplorer.vbs", maske sure that the extension is ".vbs" and not ".txt"

 

[EagleEye7]

CPU is pinned at 100% with BI using 85%... seems high. Could that be a hint?

I have no idea if it relates to your issue, but, this I not healthy at all. Are you using substream?
Can you post a picture of your camera status window, showing the resolutions, MP/s figures, etc.

 

[TonyR]

+1 on both of the above ^^^.

Yes, that CPU is waaay too high. Have you folowed the recommendations in the Wiki to optimize CPU usage including substreams?

Also, is camera video going through the LAN ports of a router to get to the BI server, also on a router's LAN port?

If so, try:

• Cameras => POE switch
• BI server LAN => POE switch
• router LAN => POE switch

 

[n2qew]

I've been running BI5 for nearly a decade. 13 cameras. It's been totally reliable until a couple of weeks ago when, an hour or two after a restart, cameras drop out one by one with a "no signal... failed to connect" error displayed on each camera's window. Restarting BI gets it running again but again after an hour or so it begins to lose the cameras.

The computer is a PC running 64-bit Windows 10. Intel Core i5-9600K CPU @ 3.70GHz. Graphics = Intel UHD Graphics 630 NVIDIA, GeForce RTX 2060 graphics card. Disk is 465 GB, about 2/3 full. Network is trouble-free.

CPU is pinned at 100% with BI using 85%... seems high. Could that be a hint?

Cameras all have static IPs. All powered by PoE. I can login to each camera though Live View doesn't work in my browsers; browsers say a plugin is needed but clicking the link gets an "insecure, download blocked" message.

Hoping an upgrade to BI6 would no longer lose connections to cameras, I purchased and installed that. Alas, same behavior.

Any suggestions on how to fix those lost camera connections?

Many thanks!
Dan

Disable all the cameras and see what CPU BI is using. If still crazy high, then start there. If low, then enable a camera at a time and see what it does to the CPU use. Maybe you'll find one camera that is doing something stupid. Could also be whatever you use for AntiVirus. Temporarily disable record. Maybe AV is looking too hard at the .bvr streams.

 

[looney2ns]

Have you properly excluded Blue Iris as per the built in help file in your antivirus software, this includes Defender.
If you had it done at one point, it will need performed again for BI6.

It would help if you post the exact cameras you are referring to.

 

[looney2ns]

Disable all the cameras and see what CPU BI is using. If still crazy high, then start there. If low, then enable a camera at a time and see what it does to the CPU use. Maybe you'll find one camera that is doing something stupid. Could also be whatever you use for AntiVirus. Temporarily disable record. Maybe AV is looking too hard at the .bvr streams.

Antivirus should have exclusions added as described in the Blue Iris help file. They should not be scanning bvr streams.

 

[looney2ns]

I've been running BI5 for nearly a decade. 13 cameras. It's been totally reliable until a couple of weeks ago when, an hour or two after a restart, cameras drop out one by one with a "no signal... failed to connect" error displayed on each camera's window. Restarting BI gets it running again but again after an hour or so it begins to lose the cameras.

The computer is a PC running 64-bit Windows 10. Intel Core i5-9600K CPU @ 3.70GHz. Graphics = Intel UHD Graphics 630 NVIDIA, GeForce RTX 2060 graphics card. Disk is 465 GB, about 2/3 full. Network is trouble-free.

CPU is pinned at 100% with BI using 85%... seems high. Could that be a hint?

Cameras all have static IPs. All powered by PoE. I can login to each camera though Live View doesn't work in my browsers; browsers say a plugin is needed but clicking the link gets an "insecure, download blocked" message.

Hoping an upgrade to BI6 would no longer lose connections to cameras, I purchased and installed that. Alas, same behavior.

Any suggestions on how to fix those lost camera connections?

Many thanks!
Dan

If you look at task manager, what is showing that is using the resources.

 

[oaklandriviera]

These are excellent suggestions and I tried them. The cameras are all healthy, the PoE feeds to the cameras are running well, virus protection is blameless, and BlueIris is behaving except for the weird disappearing cameras. Further investigation reveals that the culprit is not BI at all but a failing SSD drive. I did not expect that! The drive is part of a RAID1 pair, so no data is lost (I hope! the clone to replacement drives is in progress as we speak). What misguided me at first was that Windows' chkdsk utility came up clean. I guess it's fooled by RAID. Drilling deeper (into the BIOS) finally revealed this, after I'd gone down lots of blind alleys. My theory is that the RAID system was the cause of the high CPU load since it had to do lots of extra work for every disk access. Once the new SSDs are cloned and in place, I expect the video/BI system will be back to normal. I really appreciate all the help you BI experts provided and I send a huge THANK YOU!