Very slow performance on recording/encoding

Netcam Studio Problems & Bugs
1

Hi,

I’m using Netcam for about 2 years now but in the last couple of months I’m experiencing some issues. I switched to Netcam for the good performance and motion detection and was very happy with it. It uses about 20% of my CPU to proces two 1280x1024 h264 15 fps streams from my cabled TP-Link camera’s.

A couple of months ago, unfortunately I’m not sure when/what changed that time, the recordings started to be laggy/choppy. At first I didn’t pay to much attention to it. I suspected the camera’s, as they are not very high quality. Today I started to research some more, but didn’t find the cause to be the camera’s. If I look at the recording, I can see the first 2 seconds are good, and then the frame rate drops to, let’s say, 1 or 2 fps. In the overlay it still shows 15 fps. Now this makes me suspect something like encoding performance. So I monitored the CPU usage during a recording of two camera’s at once: It goed up to 60 - 70%, which should be sufficient.

I tried the different encoders: internal, vlc, hardware. (restarting the Netcam service in between the changes) vlc seems a little better, but still not like it should be. Then I installed Netcam 2 (beta) and tried the multi thread solution: This is a HUGE improvement! But on the downside: CPU peaks to 100% and activated my “turbo mode” on the i5 CPU. Then I also tried to use Intel QuickSync as an encoder, similar performance with multi thread disabled, similar performance with mt enabled.

Does anyone have an idea what is the problem here? (What interests me the most, is that it used to work very smooth in the past!)

One thing I didn’t try: Enable background rendering/encoding, as it is removed in 2.0. If it is worth a try, I don’t mind un/reinstalling the last final release.

Specs:
Core i5 3570K 3,4Ghz 4-core
16GB DDR3
250GB SSD
Windows 10 Pro x64 (latest release)

Any help appreciated!!

1 Like
2

Hi Thomas and welcome to the forum.

Well, we all like and interesting challenge and this one certainly looks like one :slight_smile: First, the option for background rendering/encoding was removed because that really sent the cpu load to the roof constantly. We trying to find methods to decrease the cpu load with hardware acceleration or more efficient software. In the last NCS 143 we added some more options and it seems that you have tested them all with different experience. The cams you use are HD cams, but since it is only two of them with that HW it should be no problems.
But, my first question is if this performance degrading occurred while using the same version of NCS?

-" I can see the first 2 seconds are good, and then the frame rate drops to, let’s say, 1 or 2 fps. In the overlay it still shows 15 fps". The overlay with 15 fps is what the camera delivers to NCS. What is recorded is determined by the setting in Recording:

If you obtain that depends on the cpu load.

Since you only have 2 cams I would do the drastic and go back to the version of NCS that was running when it worked fine. I think we need to figure out first if it is a problem with hardware or NCS. Check also if Windows have been updated with some mysterious things. When you go back to earlier NCS make a clean installation. Remove everything since a lot changed to version 143. The folder with the recording/thumbnails can of cause be there since that is easy to re-index to the Library again when we are done.

-Henrik