Blue Iris Initial Performance Testing

Initial performance testing with Blue Iris NVR running on Windows 10 Pro.

I'll admit, I did some initial testing of Blue Iris on another machine and experienced some significant performance challenges especially when recording continuously from multiple cameras.  It appeared that more than just a couple 3 megapixel cameras recording at one time would eat up most of the CPU even on a very powerful machine.  This is the reason for me wanting to do more extensive testing of Blue Iris and other NVR software.

Please keep in mind, my soon-to-be-replaced off-the-shelf Amcrest DVR supporting 8 - 1080p cameras is recording every camera in full resolution 24/7 and it runs very, very cool.  It can't be even 1/4 the power of the Core i7 system I just built.  This tells me either the video stream coming from the IP cameras is more intensive, the Windows operating system is creating too much overhead, or the Blue Iris software is just inefficient.  I need to get to the bottom of this.

Testing Methodology

The environment I'm testing in is a Intel i7-7700 4.2GHz processor, but only 2 of the 4 cores on this processer is assigned to the virtual machine.  The machine has an M.2 SSD and 8GB of memory assigned to it - but neither of those appear to be a bottleneck in my prior testing.

Everything has been shut down except for viewing the stream in the Blue Iris app on the Windows 10 box where Blue Iris is installed.  I also had the mobile app open, not looking at images, but rather just reading the CPU on opening page.

I'm going to add one camera at a time and add functionality.  1) Just the camera added to the program 2) Turn on alerting but not recording, 3) record with that camera.  As I add more cameras I will add recording functionality to each camera one at a time and watch CPU & Mem usage.

The memory usage is coming directly from viewing the mobile app, as is the CPU usage of Blue Iris itself.  The CPU usage of the entire machine is being captured from the VMWare monitoring console.  I could have just as easily used Task Manager in Windows, but it adds CPU usage.

My testing is with 4 of [these] Amcrest 3 megapixel PTZ cameras.  I tried to keep all other variables static such as other processes running on the machine, but there are some things I couldn't really control such as me logging in with the mobile app.  It does appear the mobile app has very little impact to the performance of the machine, which is to be expected.  The numbers below are averages in some cases because it would be +/- 4% on the CPU at any given time.

When adding each of these cameras I took the default configuration.  In the case of Blue Iris, it appears to default the resolution to the max available with the camera, in this case 3MP or 2304x1296 @ 26fps.  For comparison testing I will be locking in these resolutions and frame rates to ZoneMinder as well.

So, here we go ...

Here are the results:

Camera Line-up	CPU on VM	CPU on Blue Iris	Memory
1 Cam no alerting, no recording	10.09%	7%	365MB
1 Cam alerting not recording	10.25%	7%	365MB
1 Cam recording	40%	33%	371MB
2 Cam no alerting, no recording	19%	15%	549MB
2 Cam alerting not recording	31%	26%	533MB
2 Cam, 1 recording	44%	39%	611MB
2 Cam, both recording	73%	69%	675MB
3 Cam no alerting, no recording	30%	22%	784MB
3 Cam alerting not recording	29%	26%	791MB
3 Cam, 1 recording	62%	57%	859MB
3 Cam, 2 recording	83%	76%	921MB
3 Cam, 3 recording	100%	99%	1.39GB
4 Cam, no alerting, no recording	50%	41%	1.01GB
4 Cam, alerting not recording	52%	49%	1.00GB
4 Cam, 1 recording	72%	68%	1.07GB
4 Cam, 2 recording (Blue Iris, FLAC on, with H.264)	94%	84%	1.13GB
Blue Iris no FLAC with MJPG @ 70%		58%	1.16GB
Blue Iris no FLAC with MJPG @ 30%		54%	1.16GBN
Blue Iris FLAC on, Direct to Disk Recording		48%	1.01GB
Blue Iris FLAC off, Direct to Disk Recording		38%	1.06GB
Changed to WMV		100%	1.36GB
Changed to MPEG		61%	1.16GB
Changed to AVI		54%	1.14GB
4 Cam, 3 recording	100%	93%	1.19GB
4 Cam, 4 recording (Blue Iris, FLAC on, H.264)	100%	100%	5.32GB and climbing
Blue Iris FLAC off, Direct to Disk Recording		49%	1.08GB

My findings:

First, the problem is not with Windows - there is approximately 5-7% CPU usage overhead with Windows in every scenario up to the CPU reaching 100%.  That's not to say there isn't more efficient usage of the CPU for video compression on a lighter operating system like Linux, but we may not be able to determine whether that is due to the operating system or NVR software.

Secondly, setting the cameras to alert and record motion doesn't seem to create much overhead - but obviously when they do start recording it is a big CPU impact just like when they are continuously recording.

Thirdly, memory only becomes an issue when CPU reaches 100%.  This seems logical, the memory needs to hold more information that is not yet processed by the CPU.  This gets really ugly, really quick - you don't want to run out of CPU!

Finally, there is definitely a performance hit when recording full time to disk in any configuration.  However, there are some default settings that are contributing to approximately half of this CPU usage (as seen in the 4 Cams - 2 recording part of my testing).  Making some minor tweaks to how Blue Iris records can take this from horrible to almost tolerable.  Specifically, if you can handle not compressing the data (and make up for it with disk space), not rotating the image and not overlaying data - you can change the Video Compression to "Direct-to-disc".  This may require that you get a little more aggressive with offloading your NEW video to the STORED location on a larger disk and then doing compression when offloading to this location.

For me, this means my NEW will only be held for 2 days before it is offloaded to STORED.  And when I do move it to STORED, I will be compressing it using MP4.

Additionally, I'm going to turn off FLAC compression as well because I really don't care how big the audio channel is on the video.  It's not a huge savings on CPU, but it could be compounded as I add more cameras.

Conclusion:

I'm still not happy about eating up 1/2 of my CPU to record 4 - 3 megapixel cameras, but it sure beats the out-of-the-box configuration where 2 cameras is all that can be recording at any given time.  Technically speaking, if I were to throw all 4 cores at this machine, I could record 8 cameras full-time and still sit about 50% CPU.

Clearly when I end up with 16+ cameras in my system I'm going to need to be very creative about when they are recording.  If I stick with Blue Iris, my days of recording every camera all the time is over.  This might be the kiss of death for Blue Iris but it does require that I find another piece of NVR software that is as feature rich as Blue Iris but is more efficient with recording.