lots of errors...

mfassett
mfassett
edited September 2014 in SecuritySpy
I'll try and provide as much info as possible, but I'm getting a lot of errors daily for my system.

Mac mini i7, 16g ram. Seven cameras:

- dahua outdoor x2 720p (wifi)
- foscam ptz indoor x 3 480p (wired and wifi)
- dlink indoor x2 480p (wifi)

Every camera is set up with static IP. Using apple airport extreme router.

Errors seem to happen more on the Dahua but also on the foscams.
- no route to host (HOSTUNREACH)
- excessive packet loss
- operation timed out

There is also an occasional "computer overloaded" message as well.

Any thoughts on what the story is?

I have a separate user account for security spy always running in the background. The other user is for iTunes and iPhoto and light web browsing.

Comments

  • Ben
    Ben
    Hi - these errors indicate network problems. With so many cameras on WiFi you are probably running out of WiFi bandwidth. Is your Mac connected by WiFi as well? This will also exacerbate the problems - ideally you will want your Mac connected to the router by wired ethernet.

    You could try reducing the frame rate of each camera, so that they are consuming less WiFi bandwidth. For example, set them all to 5fps (or even less) to see if this helps.

    The "no route to host" and timeout errors also indicate WiFi reception/interference issues. If you are able to switch any of the cameras from wireless to wired ethernet then I would strongly suggest you do this.

    Or, for the cameras that are furthest from the router, it might be a good idea to set up an additional wireless network to boost the signal to them, and to double your available WiFi bandwidth. To do this, use an AirPort Express in bridge mode, connected by ethernet cable to your AirPort Extreme router.
  • mfassett
    mfassett
    Thanks Ben!

    I think I made an error though.. the two dahua cameras are actually wired, though they are powered via POE and unlike the rest of my network which is gigabit, the POE switch I have is 100m. Could that be the issue?

    I will indeed try and lower the frame rate.

    My mac is connected via gigabit to my airport extreme, so I'm good there.

    So really I have the two dlink cameras on wifi, and two of the three foscam cameras. So it shouldn't be that bad...

    Also one other thing. I noticed security spy is taking 80% CPU, which seems very excessive... and seems like it's new. I'm wondering if I should delete all my prefs and start over??

  • mfassett
    mfassett
    BTW, lowered the frame rate and bit rate for the Dahua cameras (frame rate to 12fps, bit rate to 1072). CPU seems to be down to ~30% for security spy and things seem a bit more snappy. I'm still seeing some errors though, I'll try and dig into those.
  • Ben
    Ben
    Good to hear lowering the frame rate helped. One other thing to try is installing the latest firmware on your cameras. The D-Link firmware should be easy to find. With the Dahua firmware you may have to contact them directly to obtain it.

    80% CPU usage is reasonable for multiple high-res cameras running at high frame rates. Remember that this is relative to the number of CPU cores your Mac has - for example if you have 4 cores, then the maximum CPU usage would be reported as 400%, so 80% is using less than a quarter of the computer's total processing power.

    One final though: it sounds like you are employing two switches between the computer and the Dahua cameras - a gigabit one and one megabit PoE one. You will have better reliability if you switch to a single high-quality gigabit PoE switch for all your devices (e.g. Netgear GS108P, GS110TP etc.)
  • mfassett
    mfassett
    Yea, I don't think the POE switch I have is particularly good.. and I DO have multiple ethernet switches inline. There is no way I can get away from multiple devices, as there are location challenges, but I could possibly switch out the POE switch with a gigabit one if things don't work out, though it seems OK now. I do have latest firmware on all cameras so we're good there.

Categories