Wowza Community

CPU at 80% using one transcode instance on Xeon CPU!

I have been using Wowza for around a year now.

It started off on a 3 year old server core i5-2400 3.1ghz (CPU score 5821) running as a virtual machine and I could run 1 instance or Transcoder and the CPU would hover around 40%.

On another VM I was renting it would hover around 40% with 1 instance of transcode.

As I am purchasing more 1080p Axis cameras I have upgraded to a new Dell poweredge with a XEON E3-1271 v3 3.6Ghz (CPU score 10304) and I am running on the host operating system and 1 transcode instance keeps the CPU in Wowza running at 80-90%.

I thought upgrading to 4.2 would have included fixes for the latest CPU’s but it seems even more intensive.

Please help as it seems the more powerful server I purchase, the more CPU is used.

Just added 3 more transcodes and the CPU coped so my only issue is that I can’t gauge actually how much processing is in use and how much is free because the CPU runs at 80% with 1 transcode and 80% with 3 transcode instances running. Very strange.

Hi,

Please take a look at our Tuning guide which shows how to reduce the CPU usage on the server by increasing the Idle times for RTMP and RTSP protocols.

After editing the “Client Idle Frequency” and “RTP Idle Frequency” as per the tutorial, you will need to restart Wowza Streaming Engine for the changes to take effect.

You can also increase the IdleWorkers/CheckFrequency from 50 to 100 with a text editor in the [Wowza-install]/conf/VHost.xml file, again a restart will be required after editing this file.

You might also change the garbage collection to use “G1 (Garbage First) collector” to see if this changes the behavior you’re seeing.

If you are continue to experience higher than expected CPU utilization, it would be helpful to review your logs during this period of time. Please zip up your conf/ and logs/ directories for further review and, if possible, provide a stack trace when this escalation occurs as well. Send this to support@wowza.com.

Regards,

Salvadore