email a screen capture

[falcon999]

sorry I was gone for a bit there, I read the other message that said to minimize it and that is pretty effective, now I can do 6 cameras with 50-60 percent on all 4 cores...

hmm i had no idea it was running so much to keep the window up.



I just went ahead and opened up 7 cameras and i'm at about 60 percent on all of my 4 cores.

but if i open up the application to see the video then it goes to 100 percent on all 4 and i can barely even watch the video because the cpu is overloaded.

I have a very fast gpu, well it used to be good it is a 9800gtx but i actually removed it from that system so that it would burn a little less electricity but if it will help vit d to work, I can put it back in this weekend.

now that i see that I can run more cameras I'm going to try and see how many i can get up to. i'll just shut down processing when i'm viewing the video.

[falcon999]

my windows index is 5.8

7.1/7.1/6.7/6.7/5.8

so i guess that video card isn't that bad after all.

i also went into control panel and turned off everything and set it to optimize for performance not good looks. this computer is just for vit d, i don't run anything else on it.

[Semper Vaporo]

Are your cameras Web cams (USB interface) or NET cams (network cnx, either WiFi or wired)?

[falcon999]

all of my cameras are actually analog cameras running into a dahua dvr, then the dahua outputs a rtsp steam that's mp4, and i have vitd read that stream, basically it's about the same stream as my little linksys sends out, but it's rtsp instead of http.

so all of my video is backed up to the dvr, i just use vit d for processing 16 cameras down to something i can look at for 10 minutes per day, or less and see all of the important happenings..

[Semper Vaporo]

So they are individually addressed on a network? Are the data from the cameras being checked by your antivirus software? That could be taking CPU time.

If you shut down VDV altogether, what is the CPU usage?

If you run Task Manager, what processes are using the most CPU time? (Be sure to "Show Processes from All users")

I just cannot fathom a quad core going to 100% on all four cores like that ... confusing from my experience.

[falcon999]

I'm using Microsoft security essentials so I guess that's possible but basically all of the CPU time is being taken up by vitamin D.

[DrBunsen]

It's interesting that Falcon was able to reproduce my finding of lowering CPU utilization via minimizing VDV. (Yay! I've contributed to the community!) Even more I suspect that Semper is right that a good discrete graphics card may help with CPU utilization. I might try to work on my PC tonight to see what I can find.

[falcon999]

I know that i have a nvidia 9800 gtx hanging out, but not hooked up, the the windows experience does say that the graphics card in there right now is pretty good, mostly the hard drive dragged down my score.

[DrBunsen]

Here's something to keep under consideration: I had an nVidia 8800 GTX that was great for gaming (back in the day) but was miserable on power consumption. The card accounted for around 100 watts of power during idle, and even more while gaming. It may be that the 9800 GTX is similar to the 8800 GTX in that regard.

My current GTX 460 (on my main box) is MUCH better about power consumption while idling - as I recall, reviewers said that it pulled about 15-18 watts at idle. I was looking at those power numbers since I keep my main box on 24x7, and I don't want my office to get any hotter than necessary during Summer. Plus, I believe that 100 watts of power ends up costing me somewhere around $8 to $10 a month in electricity.

Still, if it's the only extra card you have, and if it helps on CPU utilization, then go for it. Amazingly, I was able to sell my 8800 GTX for more than $120 on eBay last year (can't remember exactly how much I got for it, but it was way more than I thought it would fetch).

[Semper Vaporo]

From the Experience Index your (Falcon999) present video card seems to be better than either of my systems and I do not see the high CPU usage in VDV. I suppose that a better card (or even just one that had different built-in features, even if it scores lower on the Experience Index) might help, but I still think it has got to be something in the operation of the system.

Granted my Surveillance pc is not normally on any network other that the one required to access my one net-cam; it is setup as a "Home or work (private) network" with no access to the internet. I do have the Windows firewall turned on, but I am not running an anti-malware program. Firewall is on only for those rare instances when I connect it to the internet to upgrade VDV or maybe a perpheral driver. When I do something like that I also run Windows Update to keep the OS current.

Again, I ask, what processes are chewing up CPU time as reported in the Task Manager "Processes" list? is it just one of the "VitaminE Agent.exe" copies, or all of them, or how evenly distributed. Is it the "VitaminD Video.exe" process? Or is it some other process?

On my system, right now, I am seeing (all the numbers are constantly changing and the numbers I am reporting are just the highs and lows that I happened to see while writing this) :
"System Idle Process" is 57 to 62 percent.
"VitaminD Video.exe*32" is at 1 percent.
The 9 copies of "VitaminD Agent.exe*32" are distributed as:
Four are showing 0 percent
One is 8 to 12 percent
One is 6 to 10 percent
Three are 4 to 6 percent.
"UMVPFSnv.exe*32" is showing 1 percent periodically as is "Taskmgr.exe*32"
"System" is 4 to 8 percent
One copy (of 11 running) of "svchost.exe" jumped to 17 percent once while I was watching, but is otherwise at 0.

That adds up to around 100 percent, but over 50 percent of it is the system idle time (which is not shown in the performance graphs).

Looking at the "Networking" tab of Task Manager, the Network Utilization is running at about 3.4 percent.

I do not know if my numbers are typical or average or really good or really bad. I throw them out here just as examples in an attempt to help narrow down where the problem in Falcon999's computer MIGHT be.