Serviio

Hey!

So, I've just started using Serviio to stream from my Mac to my Panasonic ST50. Today, I noticed that streaming started eating up all my RAM. Currently I'm using 8,21GB (of 16GB, and still rising). This does result in my streams starting to stutter after a while. Currently I'm streaming a 720p video which started stuttering after about 10 mins. What can be the cause of this?

It should not use anywhere near this amount of RAM, I'm usually on ~80MB or so.
Are you not transcoding to a RAM disk or something?

I do remember that I changed the "Transcoded files location" in the settings, if that is what you mean. The RAM usage does not show up as the Serviio app itself using all of it, in fact it shows as "inactive" RAM, which just keeps growing the longer I stream.

what process is using the RAM?

It doesn't actually say. Whenever I start streaming, RAM usage goes through the roof, although it is instantly labelled as "inactive RAM" (which still renders it 'used' and not 'free').

is this on windows? if so please post a screen grab of the processes tab when your streaming a video.

This is in OS X Mountain Lion. The attached picture show CPU and RAM usage. As you can see it does not appear Serviio is using an awful lot of either. As for the RAM usage; 'Ledig' (green colored text bottom left corner) means 'available', 'Inaktiv' (blue color) = 'inactive' and 'brukt' (black color) = 'used'. The 'inactive' RAM just keeps rising until the video becomes entirely unwatchable.

Does this happen when you disable transcoding?

No, this does not happen when transcoding is disabled. But, I think this just comes down to my own incompetence when it comes to understanding transcoding. If you want to stream, say, a 10GB videofile, and only the audio needs transcoding; does this then mean that you do indeed need 10GB of RAM to play that file smoothly when transcoding on the fly? I was under the impression that it was possible to only transcode the audio bit from one file, but is this not the case?

No, you don't need that much ram. It will write the transcoded file to the temp folder (as set in the console) and stream from the file. So unless you actually set the transcoding folder to be on a Ram disk, you should not see any excessive memory usage.

That's what I originally thought. I haven't changed the transcoded file folder, so I assume everything is ok on that front. I really can't understand why transcoding just makes a whole lot of RAM inactive instead of making it available again to the system.

I asume it depends on the OS's memory management. it might be that inactive is actually available for use of other programs.