Too much CPU load on BigBlueButton 0.81

[Sai Prasad]

Hello everyone,

We are having a rather strange issue with BigBlueButton 0.81. We have removed Bigbluebutton from our server a weekago to try openmeetings. When we switched back to BBButton 0.81 yesterday it was consuming huge amounts of resources. With no conference running the CPU load is over 1.3 and the memory utilization is over 1.6GB. When we tried a video conference with just 3 users, the CPU load shot up to 5.7 and the Memory Utlization to over 3 GB! Needless to say, the performance was terrible too. This had never happened with BBB before and we are baffled as to what went wrong. We followed the Installation guide
https://code.google.com/p/bigbluebutton/wiki/InstallationUbuntu
to the letter as we have always down. Any pointers as to what may have gone wrong would be highly appreciated.

Thanks,
Sai.

[Fred Dixon]

Hi Sai,

> When we switched back to BBButton 0.81 yesterday it was consuming huge amounts of resources

Not sure why this is happening (we've not setup openmeetings ourselves).   

You can definitely use the standard Linux tools to determine CPU usage (such as top).   If you Google for

  Linux CPU Usage

to get lots of links for such tools.

In general, we recommend not running other applications on the BigBlueButton server.  

Is it an option for you to setup a new Ubuntu 14.04 64-bit server and install BigBlueButton 0.9.0-beta?  This will get you a clean install with the latest version of BigBlueButton.  See

   https://code.google.com/p/bigbluebutton/wiki/090InstallationUbuntu

BigBlueButton 0.9.0-beta is API compatible with BigBlueButton 0.81. 

Regards,.. Fred

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "BigBlueButton-dev" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to bigbluebutton-...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to bigblueb...@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/bigbluebutton-dev.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

--
BigBlueButton Developer

http://bigbluebutton.org/
http://code.google.com/p/bigbluebutton

BigBlueButton on twitter: @bigbluebutton

[Sai Prasad]

When I say switched back, I meant it was done on a fresh install of Ubuntu 10.04, 64bit. Nothing other than bigbluebutton is running right now on the VPS.

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to a topic in the Google Groups "BigBlueButton-dev" group.
To unsubscribe from this topic, visit https://groups.google.com/d/topic/bigbluebutton-dev/5axfW7UjoZA/unsubscribe.
To unsubscribe from this group and all its topics, send an email to bigbluebutton-...@googlegroups.com.

[Fred Dixon]

Hi Sai,

How many CPU cores do you have on your VPS?  

Just to calibrate expectations, we're not going to be able to tell you why a second install is acting differently.  Assuming the software is the same (we've have not made any changes to the BigBlueButton server over the past few months, only to the client to support later versions of Java for desktop sharing), you should have the same experience.

> When we tried a video conference with just 3 users, the CPU load shot up to 5.7 and the Memory Utlization to over 3 GB!

That also does not make sense as the video packets are simply passed through the server -- there is no transcoding, just a pass through.

Recommend you look at the various CPU monitoring tools that are available for Linux and try to narrow down what processes are taking CPU.

Also, we don't recommend running BigBlueButton on a VPS as FreeSWITCH, the software switch that handles the conference, requires a hardware timer to handle the incoming audio packets.  Without a hardware timer, FreeSWITCH must work harder (more CPU) to handle the incoming packets in real-time.  

Regards,.. Fred

[Sai Prasad]

Hi Fred,

Thanks for your reply. We have 4 cores on our VPS running at 2.8GHz. We have managed to resolve the issue by installing a slightly lower version of ffmpeg. I have no idea why that is so but the load has gone down significantly and it is running as smoothly as ever. I will keep your advice about freeswitch in mind.

Thank you.

Sai

[Sai Prasad]

Also If I do run into some issues again, what would be a freeswitch alternative on a VPS?

Sai.

[Fred Dixon]

With bigbluebutton the only choice is freeswitch --- you would also have the same challenge with another soft switch,

Regards ,... Fred 

[Sai Prasad]

Ok. We are using the VPS only for testing and demo purposes. We will switch to a demo server when we go into production mode.

Thanks.