Wowza Community

Tools / Techniques to debug High CPU Usage on Wowza servers

Hi,

We are working on a pretty standard setup using wowza where we stitch mp4 files to get wowza scheduled stream and then transcode it to ABR streams which is then used to create custom HLS chunks, which is finally delivered using CDN.

The issue is we are having is that the wowza servers are experiencing high CPU usage. We restart the servers when they exceed certain threshold because it directly affects the stream playback. Restart brings the CPU usage to normal, but then the process repeats over a course of few days. We are trying to get to the bottom of the issue. We have tried analyzing thread dumps when the CPU usage was high, but that didn’t lead us anywhere. We were wondering if there is any method/tool you guys use/suggest on profiling the cpu/performance of the wowza server process? Please let me know if you need any more details

Thanks in advance

We do have some articles on best practices that I can share with you @Ashok Adhikari:

  1. Best practices to lower CPU

  2. Reduce load on CPU with graphic cards

  3. Engine Tuning to reduce CPU

If you still experience too high of a load on the server, you may want consider the Wowza Load balancer tool.

Hi Rose,

Thanks for the response. I have already gone through the links that you sent. I had also gone through the transcoder performance benchmark you have here https://www.wowza.com/docs/wowza-transcoder-performance-benchmark. The server we use for the number of input streams is bigger than what’s recommended there.

The problem however is that the CPU utilization is normal for few days and then suddenly starts going up. There must be some threads malfunctioning or something else going on. I wanted to get help me on how such scenarios are debugged or what tools are used to analyze such behavior

Ok, that’s too bad, I was hoping that would help. I checked with tech support and they said it would require deeper analysis through a support ticket. There could be too many reasons why and they need to run some tests.

https://www.wowza.com/support/open-ticket