Memory Leak

[Peeker]

Every few days my computer grinds to a screeching halt because it runs out of memory and hard disk space. I am forced to restart. One time I was able to get Activity Monitor open to see that SH had multiple threads each using several dozens of gigabytes of memory. Due to this the swap file filled up my HD. Is there a way to prevent this?

Sighthound 6.1.1 build 17563
6 cameras
Mac OS Catalina 10.15.2
RAM: 16 GB
HD space: 65 GB free when not eaten up by the swap file
Mac Mini 2018 2.6 GHz quad core i3
Graphics: Intel UHD 630 with 1.5GB of ram

[Kbond]

Hello,

Thank you for reaching out. Sighthound Video is a multi-process application. You should see 5 processes + an additional for each enabled camera. The more CPU intensive processes are the cameras, recording and analyzing the streams. The other processes serve various functions such as monitoring and managing hard drive usage and removing old videos, hosting remote access, and sending responses.

With Sighthound Video version 6 using our main Computer Vision software as the backend, CPU load is a bit higher. If your computer is struggling with keeping up, it might be a good idea to revert back to Sighthound Video version 5.1.7. You can do that by going to the link below and clicking "Looking for a previous version?" under Download Sighthound Video:

https://www.sighthound.com/account/#/sighthound-video

Please don't hesitate to reach out to support be emailing us at [email protected], thank you!

[Peeker]

Thanks for this info. I have at any given time 15 processes running with only 6 cameras connected. Usually they are each using hundreds of megabytes each. Which I guess might be reasonable. But when they start using dozens of gigabytes, what might be wrong?

[Kbond]

Hello,

If you click Help > Report a Problem directly from Sighthound VIdeo, that will send us your logs and we can take a deeper look at what is going on. When you send that report in, it will auto-create a ticket. We will reply to you directly from that.

We will be standing by for your reply, thank you!

[eviddy]

Is it possible to disable the data retention function when pumping?

[Semper Vaporo]

I don't know what you mean by "pumping", but as long as the camera is "ON" in Sighthound the video is being recorded to the storage device... the only thing that breaks that raw continuous video into clips is a rule that writes the start time of the trigger into the database. (The raw video is stored in a series of files of 2 minutes each, but that series of files is treated in the program as one long video file.

The rules save the start time of a motion trigger in a database so you can view the clip associated with that rule event. The clip can span across a couple of physical files, but without storing all the raw video there would be no way to recover the video around the trigger time.

When the storage gets full, another instance of Sighthound deletes the parts of the raw files that are not part of the clip video to be kept "by rule" (combining any spanned files into one file per event). Eventually, even those saved files need to be deleted to make room for more raw video.

But there is nothing you can do to stop the storage of the raw video except to turn off the camera, but then you cannot see the live video on screen (main view window or thumbnails at the side).

[Yamara]

Have you ever checked your computer for someone to connect to you? There are cases of hacking for mining. I would recommend good testing of your computer and checking for malware

[jpwhit]

I recently ran into the same issue. I have one sighthound server that has been running at my main residence for a while and it doesn't suffer from running out of memory. I just installed a second server at a vacation house and ran into this issue. The server at my main house was running on OS-X High Sierra. At the vacation house, it was using Mojave. I downgraded the server at the vacation house to High Sierra, and the memory leak problem went away. So it look like the memory leak occurs on newer versions of OS-X.

Now I need to figure out another issue, which is I'm no longer getting mobile notification since I re-installed the Sighthound server at the vacation house.

[Peeker]

This is still happening every couple days.
I have 32 GB of ram which fills up, and a hundred or so GB of hard drive space which fills up with a gigantic swap file.
This of course causes the operating system to grind to a screeching halt.

Is there any hope of this being fixed? Sighthound is so unreliable because without notice, it will stop functioning due to running out of memory.

[jeyrb]

Same here with a 48Gb RAM MacPro on Mojave.

Sighthound consumes all the memory on the box every week or so and triggers the force quit dialog. Won't restart after being killed unless the Mac is restarted.

Seems like the domestic video product is a side project now for Sighthound, so looking for an alternative now.