How to Determine your Camect is Overloaded

[ZzyzxOh]

I was hoping we could start a thread about how to objectively determine you have added too many cameras or streams to a Camect device.

I am seeing "jumpy" video playback, meaning a vehicle captured going down the street moves about 6-meters at a time. I'm pretty confident this is because I have too many cameras under test but I wanted to confirm this was an example of what behavior the Camect would exhibit under overload conditions and how I might objectively confirm this (other than seeing this, is there a status or statistic somewhere?).

Thank you. Be safe.

[Rob Taft]

This is a great question and I also would like to know this.  My understanding is that jumpy video can happen based on just a single camera's resolution though.  I have a three 4K cameras that pretty consistently display that way but other lower res cameras don't.

[AAron nAAs]

Out of curiosity, try downloading a video segment from the feed, and see if it is jumpy/missing frames as well. (Frame it with the braces, then click download)

That may help you determine that UI playback is the issue, and not the capture/processing.

[Rob Taft]

In my case it’s definitely the UI. Downloaded videos play normally.

[ZzyzxOh]

I agree, Rob, I tested the downloads, too. They don't skip. Now how do we change where they are stored? My Downloads folder is on a small SSD.

[Russell Singleton]

Hi All,

I also have jumpy playback in the UI, but not in the downloaded video files, nor in the event files that the Camect is automatically saving to my Google Drive. I have the following cameras and would like to know more about whether I’m overloading my Camect.

3 x 3MP Hikvision on Domes

1 x 6MP Hikvision Dome

1 x 2MP Annke cube (rebranded Hikvision)

1 x 2MP LaView doorbell camera (rebranded Hikvision)

Total is 19MP of the possible 24MP (understanding that this is an estimate).

I would need to log in and check but I believe all my domes are running at 30fps and H265 encoding. The cube and doorbell are probably 20fps and H264.

I’d like to propose an online calculator that Camect make available where we plug in our cams, their resolutions, frame rate and encoding and then it tells us what percentage of the Camect processing capacity we’ll be using. Is this possible? Who else would like this?

Alternatively, a user friendly workload/performance metric on the UI would potentially avoid these questions?

Regards,

Russell

On Apr 8, 2020, at 19:58, ZzyzxOh <TechnologyR...@gmail.com> wrote:



I agree, Rob, I tested the downloads, too. They don't skip. Now how do we change where they are stored? My Downloads folder is on a small SSD.

On Wednesday, April 8, 2020 at 10:34:39 AM UTC-4, Rob Taft wrote:

In my case it’s definitely the UI. Downloaded videos play normally.

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[CamectArup]

Short answer: If your Camect is overloaded, you'll frequently see "Camect Home is Busy" when viewing in the UI, and you'll see a message below the display of cameras that says "System is Busy. Please consider disabling some cameras."  However, this is only displayed when things are getting bad enough to the point of not being able to serve even 1 fps on some streams. 

More generally, the question of load is not something that can easily be reduced to a bunch of simple metrics. There are 4 things that can get overloaded (CPU, GPU, memory, disk), and for 3 of them (CPU, GPU, memory) the system attempts to alter its behavior if resources are getting tight, so you can't simply report CPU usage to show how loaded the system is. 

Jerky video also is not always an indication of overload either. Most of the time, the video you see does have to be encoded, and the priority for encoding for viewing is lower than that for decoding and analyzing video ... so you'll see the UI degrade before the system gets to the point of losing video or missing alerts, etc. The cost of handling also varies greatly with the amount of motion involved -- so you may only see it happen when many cameras see motion at the same time. 

Jerkiness also depends on the resolution you're viewing at ... in the multi-camera view, resolution is limited to a max of VGA resolution, so encoding isn't very expensive. If you're viewing in full resolution, encoding costs a lot more and even if your system is mostly fine, you may see some amount of jerkiness due to the limitations of what the encoder can do in real time. This is especially true for 4K video, which is very expensive to encode. 

Jerkiness can also be caused by a lack of sufficient bandwidth to the viewing device (or bugs in our attempts to estimate what's available). If direct webRTC connections are not working and you're falling back to a proxy, that will also lower available bandwidth. 

To add more complexity to the situation at higher resolutions, there are some conditions under which full resolution playback can send the original video that came from the camera, instead of having to re-encode it -- allowing you to see smooth video even if the device is fairly busy.  This requires that your browser be able to accept video that comes from the camera (never true if you're using h264+ or h265), that your browser view is full-width and at maximum resolution, and that your network connection appears to be fast enough. 

Since there's so much variability in the inputs to the system it's hard to turn this all into some simple stats we could show in the UI. If you think your system is overloaded, the best option is usually to try disabling a camera or two and see whether it makes a real difference. 

[Rob Taft]

Hi Arup, this is a really helpful breakdown. Would it be possible to have a resolution selector for the single camera view? That way I can get the larger image and also get a smooth playback if it starts to get choppy.

I do also want to note that the jerkiness has gotten much better for me over the 3-4 months I’ve been using it so thanks for making improvements in this regard.

[CamectArup]

On Friday, April 10, 2020 at 5:39:32 PM UTC-7, Rob Taft wrote:

Hi Arup, this is a really helpful breakdown. Would it be possible to have a resolution selector for the single camera view? That way I can get the larger image and also get a smooth playback if it starts to get choppy.

I'm wondering what you meant by "That way I can get the larger image" ... Are you asking about viewing on a desktop? On a phone you can view the lower res of the multi-camera view at a larger size by rotating the phone to landscape. On a desktop, now that we have full screen view raise the resolution, there is indeed to way to have a larger view at lower resolution. 

[Rob Taft]

I'm not sure the exact conditions that create it but there are definitely times when I see choppy playback when trying to view an individual camera.  Landscape orientation of the multi-camera view on my phone is extremely blurry.  I personally would like to be able to choose the resolution I'm viewing at when in individual camera views.