CPU Question

[rdavey228]

Hi

I have 4 1080p PoE IP cameras running into MotionEye using rtsp

To start with I had the resolution at 1920x1080 and for motion detection and image grabs on motion detection this was fine.

My problem starts when I want to record video! At this resolution, even with only 1 camera enabled (the rest are off) my CPU is 100% all the time. I have tried to drop the resolution of the camera down to 1280x768 but CPU is still 100% when recording and FPS drops from 8/10fps to 0.5/1fps 2fps if I'm lucky.

The cameras are running into a top of the line Cisco POE gigabit switch and are on their own dedicated CCTV VLAN along with MotionEye.

I am running motioneye inside a docker container. The docker installation sits inside a Hyper-V VM which is running Ubuntu 18.04. The Underlying Ubuntu Installation that runs docker has 8vCPU assigned to it and 8GB of RAM. Nothing else is running on this ubuntu VM apart from Docker and motioneye is the only container that Docker is running.

I even have a crappy mjpeg camera covering my garage running into motion eye at the worst resolution possible and recording still is at 100% CPU.

Any help would be appreciated please?

Thanks Ross

[jasaw]

Try passthrough recording. https://rawgit.com/Motion-Project/motion/master/motion_config.html#movie_passthrough

[rdavey228]

Thanks but that doesn’t help me

The documentation says it will ignore any text overlays which I need and also any masks applied to the camera. I need the masks as it’s in a residential area and part of the camera covers a road that I do not want to trigger on every time a car goes past.

I can’t believe that even with one camera that at 640x960 resolution can’t record without spiking the cpu to 100% on a system that has been given 6 processors and is on enterprise spec hardware that’s just ludicrous

[jasaw]

Your RTSP video stream is already encoded. To do motion detection on it, your server needs to decode (in CPU) the video stream, then run motion detection on the raw video. Motion software then adds text overlays to the raw video, then encodes it (in CPU) to whatever format that you've selected. The video encoding is VERY CPU intensive.

With pass-through recording, the idea is to skip the encoding part. That also means you can't add text overlays onto the video because that involves decode-add-encode.

If you still want text overlays, you could offload video encoding (and maybe encoding too) to the GPU. Make sure your ffmpeg library supports hardware accelerated video encoder. In your thread-1.conf file, set your preferred encoder this way ffmpeg_video_codec <format>:<encoder>. Example ffmpeg_video_codec mp4:h264_nvenc. Which encoder to use depends on what's available on your system. Please read ffmpeg hwaccel documentation for more info. If you do go down this option, please report back on how you went. I'm interested to know how hwaccel perform on other systems.

[rdavey228]

Hi jasaw

I have tried your suggestion but my CPU is still flatlined at 100%.

Only happens when recording. My CPU when streaming but not recording all 4 cameras at 1920x1080 is hovering around 20/30% CPU.

[jasaw]

That means you're still using CPU to encode the video. Make sure you actually have a hardware accelerated video encoder. Run ffmpeg -encoders and see which hardware accelerated video encoder is available on your system. h264_nvenc won't be available if you don't have nVidia GPU. If you have Intel GPU, try h264_vaapi instead if it's available.

[rdavey228]

Yep - Ran that command and got the following output

Encoders:
 V..... = Video
 A..... = Audio
 S..... = Subtitle
 .F.... = Frame-level multithreading
 ..S... = Slice-level multithreading
 ...X.. = Codec is experimental
 ....B. = Supports draw_horiz_band
 .....D = Supports direct rendering method 1
 ------
 V..... a64multi             Multicolor charset for Commodore 64 (codec a64_multi)
 V..... a64multi5            Multicolor charset for Commodore 64, extended with 5th color (colram) (codec a64_multi5)
 V..... alias_pix            Alias/Wavefront PIX image
 V..... amv                  AMV Video
 V..... apng                 APNG (Animated Portable Network Graphics) image
 V..... asv1                 ASUS V1
 V..... asv2                 ASUS V2
 V..... avrp                 Avid 1:1 10-bit RGB Packer
 V..X.. avui                 Avid Meridien Uncompressed
 V..... ayuv                 Uncompressed packed MS 4:4:4:4
 V..... bmp                  BMP (Windows and OS/2 bitmap)
 V..... cinepak              Cinepak
 V..... cljr                 Cirrus Logic AccuPak
 V.S... vc2                  SMPTE VC-2 (codec dirac)
 V.S... dnxhd                VC3/DNxHD
 V..... dpx                  DPX (Digital Picture Exchange) image
 VFS... dvvideo              DV (Digital Video)
 V.S... ffv1                 FFmpeg video codec #1
 VF.... ffvhuff              Huffyuv FFmpeg variant
 V..... flashsv              Flash Screen Video
 V..... flashsv2             Flash Screen Video Version 2
 V..... flv                  FLV / Sorenson Spark / Sorenson H.263 (Flash Video) (codec flv1)
 V..... gif                  GIF (Graphics Interchange Format)
 V..... h261                 H.261
 V..... h263                 H.263 / H.263-1996
 V.S... h263p                H.263+ / H.263-1998 / H.263 version 2
 V..... libx264              libx264 H.264 / AVC / MPEG-4 AVC / MPEG-4 part 10 (codec h264)
 V..... libx264rgb           libx264 H.264 / AVC / MPEG-4 AVC / MPEG-4 part 10 RGB (codec h264)
 V..... h264_nvenc           NVIDIA NVENC H.264 encoder (codec h264)
 V..... h264_omx             OpenMAX IL H.264 video encoder (codec h264)
 V..... h264_vaapi           H.264/AVC (VAAPI) (codec h264)
 V..... nvenc                NVIDIA NVENC H.264 encoder (codec h264)
 V..... nvenc_h264           NVIDIA NVENC H.264 encoder (codec h264)
 V..... hap                  Vidvox Hap
 V..... libx265              libx265 H.265 / HEVC (codec hevc)
 V..... nvenc_hevc           NVIDIA NVENC hevc encoder (codec hevc)
 V..... hevc_nvenc           NVIDIA NVENC hevc encoder (codec hevc)
 V..... hevc_vaapi           H.265/HEVC (VAAPI) (codec hevc)
 VF.... huffyuv              Huffyuv / HuffYUV
 V..... jpeg2000             JPEG 2000
 VF.... libopenjpeg          OpenJPEG JPEG 2000 (codec jpeg2000)
 VF.... jpegls               JPEG-LS
 VF.... ljpeg                Lossless JPEG
 VFS... mjpeg                MJPEG (Motion JPEG)
 V..... mjpeg_vaapi          MJPEG (VAAPI) (codec mjpeg)
 V.S... mpeg1video           MPEG-1 video
 V.S... mpeg2video           MPEG-2 video
 V..... mpeg2_vaapi          MPEG-2 (VAAPI) (codec mpeg2video)
 V.S... mpeg4                MPEG-4 part 2
 V..... libxvid              libxvidcore MPEG-4 part 2 (codec mpeg4)
 V..... msmpeg4v2            MPEG-4 part 2 Microsoft variant version 2
 V..... msmpeg4              MPEG-4 part 2 Microsoft variant version 3 (codec msmpeg4v3)
 V..... msvideo1             Microsoft Video-1
 V..... pam                  PAM (Portable AnyMap) image
 V..... pbm                  PBM (Portable BitMap) image
 V..... pcx                  PC Paintbrush PCX image
 V..... pgm                  PGM (Portable GrayMap) image
 V..... pgmyuv               PGMYUV (Portable GrayMap YUV) image
 VF.... png                  PNG (Portable Network Graphics) image
 V..... ppm                  PPM (Portable PixelMap) image
 VF.... prores               Apple ProRes
 VF.... prores_aw            Apple ProRes (codec prores)
 V.S... prores_ks            Apple ProRes (iCodec Pro) (codec prores)
 V..... qtrle                QuickTime Animation (RLE) video
 V..... r10k                 AJA Kona 10-bit RGB Codec
 V..... r210                 Uncompressed RGB 10-bit
 V..... rawvideo             raw video
 V..... roqvideo             id RoQ video (codec roq)
 V..... rv10                 RealVideo 1.0
 V..... rv20                 RealVideo 2.0
 V..... sgi                  SGI image
 V..... snow                 Snow
 V..... sunrast              Sun Rasterfile image
 V..... svq1                 Sorenson Vector Quantizer 1 / Sorenson Video 1 / SVQ1
 V..... targa                Truevision Targa image
 V..... libtheora            libtheora Theora (codec theora)
 VF.... tiff                 TIFF image
 VF.... utvideo              Ut Video
 V..... v210                 Uncompressed 4:2:2 10-bit
 V..... v308                 Uncompressed packed 4:4:4
 V..... v408                 Uncompressed packed QT 4:4:4:4
 V..... v410                 Uncompressed 4:4:4 10-bit
 V..... libvpx               libvpx VP8 (codec vp8)
 V..... vp8_vaapi            VP8 (VAAPI) (codec vp8)
 V..... libvpx-vp9           libvpx VP9 (codec vp9)
 V..... libwebp_anim         libwebp WebP image (codec webp)
 V..... libwebp              libwebp WebP image (codec webp)
 V..... wmv1                 Windows Media Video 7
 V..... wmv2                 Windows Media Video 8
 V..... wrapped_avframe      AVFrame to AVPacket passthrough
 V..... xbm                  XBM (X BitMap) image
 V..... xface                X-face image
 V..... xwd                  XWD (X Window Dump) image
 V..... y41p                 Uncompressed YUV 4:1:1 12-bit
 V..... yuv4                 Uncompressed packed 4:2:0
 VF.... zlib                 LCL (LossLess Codec Library) ZLIB
 V..... zmbv                 Zip Motion Blocks Video
 A..... aac                  AAC (Advanced Audio Coding)
 A..... ac3                  ATSC A/52A (AC-3)
 A..... ac3_fixed            ATSC A/52A (AC-3) (codec ac3)
 A..... adpcm_adx            SEGA CRI ADX ADPCM
 A..... g722                 G.722 ADPCM (codec adpcm_g722)
 A..... g726                 G.726 ADPCM (codec adpcm_g726)
 A..... adpcm_ima_qt         ADPCM IMA QuickTime
 A..... adpcm_ima_wav        ADPCM IMA WAV
 A..... adpcm_ms             ADPCM Microsoft
 A..... adpcm_swf            ADPCM Shockwave Flash
 A..... adpcm_yamaha         ADPCM Yamaha
 A..... alac                 ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec)
 A..... comfortnoise         RFC 3389 comfort noise generator
 A..X.. dca                  DCA (DTS Coherent Acoustics) (codec dts)
 A..... eac3                 ATSC A/52 E-AC-3
 A..... flac                 FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec)
 A..... g723_1               G.723.1
 A..... libgsm               libgsm GSM (codec gsm)
 A..... libgsm_ms            libgsm GSM Microsoft variant (codec gsm_ms)
 A..X.. mlp                  MLP (Meridian Lossless Packing)
 A..... mp2                  MP2 (MPEG audio layer 2)
 A..... mp2fixed             MP2 fixed point (MPEG audio layer 2) (codec mp2)
 A..... libtwolame           libtwolame MP2 (MPEG audio layer 2) (codec mp2)
 A..... libmp3lame           libmp3lame MP3 (MPEG audio layer 3) (codec mp3)
 A..... libshine             libshine MP3 (MPEG audio layer 3) (codec mp3)
 A..... nellymoser           Nellymoser Asao
 A..X.. opus                 Opus
 A..... libopus              libopus Opus (codec opus)
 A..... pcm_alaw             PCM A-law / G.711 A-law
 A..... pcm_f32be            PCM 32-bit floating point big-endian
 A..... pcm_f32le            PCM 32-bit floating point little-endian
 A..... pcm_f64be            PCM 64-bit floating point big-endian
 A..... pcm_f64le            PCM 64-bit floating point little-endian
 A..... pcm_mulaw            PCM mu-law / G.711 mu-law
 A..... pcm_s16be            PCM signed 16-bit big-endian
 A..... pcm_s16be_planar     PCM signed 16-bit big-endian planar
 A..... pcm_s16le            PCM signed 16-bit little-endian
 A..... pcm_s16le_planar     PCM signed 16-bit little-endian planar
 A..... pcm_s24be            PCM signed 24-bit big-endian
 A..... pcm_s24daud          PCM D-Cinema audio signed 24-bit
 A..... pcm_s24le            PCM signed 24-bit little-endian
 A..... pcm_s24le_planar     PCM signed 24-bit little-endian planar
 A..... pcm_s32be            PCM signed 32-bit big-endian
 A..... pcm_s32le            PCM signed 32-bit little-endian
 A..... pcm_s32le_planar     PCM signed 32-bit little-endian planar
 A..... pcm_s64be            PCM signed 64-bit big-endian
 A..... pcm_s64le            PCM signed 64-bit little-endian
 A..... pcm_s8               PCM signed 8-bit
 A..... pcm_s8_planar        PCM signed 8-bit planar
 A..... pcm_u16be            PCM unsigned 16-bit big-endian
 A..... pcm_u16le            PCM unsigned 16-bit little-endian
 A..... pcm_u24be            PCM unsigned 24-bit big-endian
 A..... pcm_u24le            PCM unsigned 24-bit little-endian
 A..... pcm_u32be            PCM unsigned 32-bit big-endian
 A..... pcm_u32le            PCM unsigned 32-bit little-endian
 A..... pcm_u8               PCM unsigned 8-bit
 A..... real_144             RealAudio 1.0 (14.4K) (codec ra_144)
 A..... roq_dpcm             id RoQ DPCM
 A..X.. s302m                SMPTE 302M
 A..X.. sonic                Sonic
 A..X.. sonicls              Sonic lossless
 A..... libspeex             libspeex Speex (codec speex)
 A..X.. truehd               TrueHD
 A..... tta                  TTA (True Audio)
 A..X.. vorbis               Vorbis
 A..... libvorbis            libvorbis (codec vorbis)
 A..... wavpack              WavPack
 A..... libwavpack            (codec wavpack)
 A..... wmav1                Windows Media Audio 1
 A..... wmav2                Windows Media Audio 2
 S..... ssa                  ASS (Advanced SubStation Alpha) subtitle (codec ass)
 S..... ass                  ASS (Advanced SubStation Alpha) subtitle
 S..... dvbsub               DVB subtitles (codec dvb_subtitle)
 S..... dvdsub               DVD subtitles (codec dvd_subtitle)
 S..... mov_text             3GPP Timed Text subtitle
 S..... srt                  SubRip subtitle (codec subrip)
 S..... subrip               SubRip subtitle
 S..... text                 Raw text subtitle
 S..... webvtt               WebVTT subtitle
 S..... xsub                 DivX subtitles (XSUB)

I used ffmpeg_video_codec mp4:h264_vaapi as per your suggestion as that was in my list above. Set camera to record and CPU is still 100% when recording!

[rdavey228]

Ok, I tried something different and installed motioneye onto its own box. This was a spare Dell R610 I had lying around. The system has 72GB of memory and 12 cores to which I assigned all of it to this system!

I set my camera at the lowest resolution and set the camera to record.

Turns out whilst I can use GPU acceleration, the GPU in these machines is very basic so wouldst be much use so I'm back to using CPU.

CPU still spiked out at 100%....I cannot understand that with all that power the system still cant keep up recording a single camera at such a small resolution. I am currently recording all of my cameras at full resolution into a windows OS based NVR at the moment all with motion detection and text and zone overlays with only 4 CPUs assigned and 8gb of memory and it doesn't bat an eyelid....so why is motion so bad at doing utilising system resources when I've given it the entire 12 cores of the CPU and 72GB of memory.

I wanted to move over to motioneye as its a smaller footprint being able to run it on a core Ubuntu OS inside docker rather than spinning up an entire windows environment. I also like the web browser of Motioneye for viewing my cameras too, something my current NVR won't do unless I pay for it as its not included in the free version.

[rdavey228]

I have also tried passthu as recommended above just to see if it made a difference.....it didn't....

CPU still 100%.

I did find this on motions support page

This does not seem to be solvable in Motion code. RTSP thread must run at the speed the camera is issuing pictures and can not be slowed to a lower frame rate without smearing of images which triggers false positives.

My cameras output at 1080p and cant be changed. So even though I set Motioneye to use a lower resolution it seems the recording still processes the full 1080p stream which seems to be what is killing the CPU. I still don't understand though why with 12 cores thrown at it that it still struggles to process 1 video at 1080p.

Any one know why when I tried passthu my CPU was still 100%? If its not encoding/decoding the video then why does my CPU spike still when using this mode?

[jasaw]

I see you have these hardware accelerated encoders, but don't know why your CPU is still running at 100%

V..... h264_nvenc NVIDIA NVENC H.264 encoder (codec h264) V..... h264_omx OpenMAX IL H.264 video encoder (codec h264) V..... h264_vaapi H.264/AVC (VAAPI) (codec h264)

You could try using ffmpeg to transcode a video using one of these encoders, see what your CPU load is like. If your CPU load is still 100%, then there's nothing motionEye or motion can do about it.

About the passthrough recording, you could try doing motion detection on the low res video, and record the high res video. Most IP cameras support 2 video streams (low and high res). You might also want to ask motion developers about your passthrough recording using 100% CPU.

[kleini]

See https://github.com/ccrisan/motioneye/blob/master/motioneye/mediafiles.py#L46

There is a hard selection of codecs, which can not be replaced easily using the accelerated encoders.

[jasaw]

@kleini Yes, the codec selection cannot be changed to an arbitrary codec from motionEye front end, but can be changed by editing the thread-1.conf file directly.

[SealedJoy]

+1 also experiencing mad cpu load on ubuntu desktop (mint) install. I am using a single usb webcam at 640x480 (microsoft lifecam 5000) with motion detection off and still hitting 90% cpu with 8gb mem. Not running inside of a docker container either.

[jkaberg]

I'd just like to mention that if you're using the docker container and want to do GPU stuff, you need to pass the GPU into the container, eg;

docker run ... --device /dev/dri:/dev/dri --privileged ...

https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/commandline/run/#add-host-device-to-container---device

[nopmop]

I don't think it's related (only) to encoding. On my RPi 3 B+ the CPU is 100% busy only when the framerate is over 4, which coincidentally is the number of processors.

Could it be a spinlock issue between threads??

[maxi1134]

Did you ever found a solution to this issue?

[Joshua2504]

I have to leave a comment on this.

I'm currently setting up a motioneye environment on an home server running 8 GB of memory and an i5-7400. Running 1x 1080p, 2x 1440p, 2x 360p. No recording, no motion detection. The CPU burns to death and the rtsp streams are barely smooth at just 10fps!

Streams are coming over a dedicated wifi bridge (cameras in it's own vLAN, behind a powerfull Cisco PoE switch too...), so I thought it's related to that somehow, but running all streams via VLC works just fine.

Shinobi and others can run just fine while recording, and it's a shame motion(eye). can't even without.

[kleini]

@Joshua2504 Maybe its time to drop the motioneye project and use something else, if it is better. Why do you stick to motioneye and blame this community project?

[Joshua2504]

@kleini motioneye builds on motion which is the issue at this point. motion is a CPU-roasting monster as soon as it starts to touch your raw streams in any way. motioneye was made for a raspberry pi and motion alone can't even really run on "good" state-of-the-art hardware.

I'm pretty happy with Shinobi now (setup given above, 30% CPU usage while permanent recording on all cameras and 2x motion detection on 1440p, pretty small files!), although it has kinda active development. I can only excuse for blaming the motioneye community on this, as this is not in your hands at all. you'ld need to build your own ffmpeg stuff and ditch motion to get the CPU load under control. If I would use my Ryzen 2600x (or a dedicated GPU with HW encoding) to decode and encode one 1440p 30fps rtsp H256 with motion(eye), it would probably run just fine.

[kleini]

motion can use HW-acceleration, which would avoid CPU-roasting. But HW may be very different and HW video support in Linux is hard: VDPAU, VA-API and vendor specific APIs, HW encoding is even harder. I was never able to get good hardware acceleration working under Linux. motioneye is a Python project, it is not made for Raspberry Pi. It works very well everywhere, but motion is the not so easy thing.