Continuous high CPU usage with 1.5.2

CPU usage climbs as high as 98%, and once it starts to rise it never returns to a normal number. I have 2 PCs that I run Serviio on, you can easily tell when Serviio starts to spike because the entire system becomes very sluggish and unresponsive, if I'm downloading anything the speed drops to a crawl.

My main PC, Windows 7 Pro 64-bit, is wired to 1 Sony player, another connects via wifi. Processor is an AMD FX-8320 8-core. The 2nd PC is older, WinXP SP 3, processor is AMD Phenom II X2 550 2-core and uses wifi to play movies and connect to both Sony players (BDP-S5100 and S5200).

Since upgrading to 1.5.2 though, both PCs will eventually just stop doing anything until I force-stop Serviio, because ServiioServer.exe is using up to 98% of the CPU. This happens on a fresh reboot, start up the server and console, and never starting either of the players at all. So there's not even any movie viewing or transcoding that's been done that might continue happening in the background, there should be nothing but updates to the library if necessary. I have all online metadata retrieval turned off. But within 2 hours or so CPU usage will be at the 98% point for Serviio.

I've tried completely uninstalling Serviio and reinstalling it several times on both PCs, no change. I've added Serviio to be excluded from my AV program, even tried it with AV turned completely off. I've tried removing any networked drives from the library, again no change. I've tried setting the library to update manually only, no change.

Last week I finally decided to try and go back to 1.4.1.2 on the WinXP machine (I know that version was working well on both PCs) to test it, and CPU usage for Serviio generally stays at 0% and might get to 10% if updating the library for a very short time only, then go back down to 0%. Even when viewing movies it never gets very high at all even while transcoding, and drops back to 0 CPU when not in use. The problem instantly went away by downgrading.

I kept 1.5.2 on the Windows 7 PC for now hoping to figure out why Serviio is doing this. The attached log was taken over a few hours where I was checking the CPU quite often. Serviio was started up at 10:13 am. CPU was still at 0% as 12:04 pm, but at 12:17 pm I noticed it was at 70% so hopefully that helps pin down the time when whatever causes it began. I deleted most entries before 12:04 to keep the file size down to the allowed limit.

[jhb50]

Delete the playlists or their items for which there are no files or add the missing files to your Serviio library. As you can see below Serviio will keep trying to resolve those conflicts.

  Code:

   Line 314: 2015-10-27 12:08:53,848 DEBUG [MediaItemDAOImpl] Looking up a media item for file path: C:\Music\MP3s\Kim Larsen\Kim Larsen - Om Lidt.mp3, ignore case: true
   Line 665: 2015-10-27 12:13:53,945 DEBUG [MediaItemDAOImpl] Looking up a media item for file path: C:\Music\MP3s\Kim Larsen\Kim Larsen - Om Lidt.mp3, ignore case: true
   Line 1016: 2015-10-27 12:18:54,024 DEBUG [MediaItemDAOImpl] Looking up a media item for file path: C:\Music\MP3s\Kim Larsen\Kim Larsen - Om Lidt.mp3, ignore case: true
   Line 1374: 2015-10-27 12:23:54,139 DEBUG [MediaItemDAOImpl] Looking up a media item for file path: C:\Music\MP3s\Kim Larsen\Kim Larsen - Om Lidt.mp3, ignore case: true
   Line 1714: 2015-10-27 12:28:54,208 DEBUG [MediaItemDAOImpl] Looking up a media item for file path: C:\Music\MP3s\Kim Larsen\Kim Larsen - Om Lidt.mp3, ignore case: true
   Line 2082: 2015-10-27 12:33:54,338 DEBUG [MediaItemDAOImpl] Looking up a media item for file path: C:\Music\MP3s\Kim Larsen\Kim Larsen - Om Lidt.mp3, ignore case: true


Thanks for catching that, I was wondering why it was looking for files long ago moved and forgot about old .m3u playlist files. I deleted all playlists and will see if that solves the problem.

Both PCs have been running 20+ hours with 1.5.2 and CPU usage has been staying between 0-2%, even while watching movies. So the old unused playlists must have been causing the problem. It's odd that 1.4.1.2 didn't have the same problem, unless that version ignored playlists.

Thanks for the help with this and the AR issue, glad to have everything working perfectly again.

And the issue is back again on the Windows 7 x64 computer for the last several days. I was able to watch more closely to pinpoint a narrower window when it started and deleted a lot of the initial library rescans to keep the file size down. At first I thought it was because I have 2 external drives as part of the library that I had turned off, but after restarting the service with the drives back on again it's still happening. I double checked that no playlist files somehow were recreated, and there are still none on my system. The server running on the WinXP PC continues to run great, but there are only video files in the library there, no music and no photos.

I turned the service back on at 5:37 pm and it was staying at 0-2% CPU usage through 7:30 pm after the initial starting scan. After that I noticed by 7:38 pm that CPU was up to 72% and staying between 66-72%. Here's the log with part of the beginning and then includes the time where the problem started. I forcibly shut down the server at 7:42 pm.

I have some music files with odd foreign characters, could that be creating a problem? Although I would expect it to happen pretty quickly and not 2 hours later since it verifies the files at the start.

I have the entire log, but it's 27k kb and would either have to split it up into smaller chunks or upload it elsewhere if you would need to see the entire log to figure out what's going on.

Edit: I should add that we were not viewing any movies from the server during that time. I also tried with the library updates turned off, but after several hours, CPU usage was high again. Metadata retrieval is always off.

[jhb50]

I don't see anything in the log, but you need to watch under taskmanager under the performance tab after clicking on the CPU column and see what "image names" ie processes that are contributing to your total CPU load.

It's always "ServiioService.exe *32" that has the high CPU usage. There's always 2 listings for ServiioService.exe *32, one using minimal memory that stays at 0% CPU (I assume that's normal because it's the same on the WinXP PC), and one with the higher memory number and that is the one that always has the high CPU usage. There's also a listing for ServiioConsole.exe *32, but that also stays at 0% CPU usage. There's no other programs showing any increase in CPU usage when everything is idle. Occasionally Firefox will raise a bit, but only when I'm browsing some sites and it's not related to the times when Serviio's CPU usage increases.

For now I'm trying it with all music and photos deleted from the Library and see if that doesn't help. There's now only video files in the library and nothing else, I'm guessing the library has been reduced by 80% or so.

I've tried everything I could think of from removing most all files, removing networked drives, starting different services that I normally have turned off (like UPNP, SSDP, SNMP, Simple TCPIP) and nothing will stop the high CPU usage with 1.5.2. So I'm finally giving up on using it and went back to 1.4.1.2 for now on the Windows 7 x64 PC. That version has been running perfectly the last 2 days, CPU use stays between 0-2% even when watching movies, haven't had to stop or restart the service at all, no reboots in that time for the PC, there have been zero problems with it.

It's somewhat of an annoyance that I'll need to install the 64 bit version of Java manually every time the 32 bit version updates, but once that's done, performance is flawless.

Unless there are any suggestions what else I could try to stop the problem with 1.5.2, I'm staying with 1.4.1.2.

After struggling this with this problem for months on both PCs where Serviio Service reached high CPU usage within a few hours of starting up the service (even when not connected to Serviio to view anything, just running on the PCs), I was excited to see a new version of Serviio and hoped it would fix my problem. It didn't, so I once again went back to 1.4.1.2. When I had time I once again started uninstalling, reinstalling, selecting different options between both Windows 7 and WinXP and still no luck with it.

Then I decided to try uninstalling Java completely first, since one big difference was that 1.4.1.2 required you to have Java installed, versions after that have Java included. Then I installed the newest version after rebooting, 1.6, and it's been running perfectly without any high CPU usage and without having to restart the Serviio Service nonstop for a week now. Yesterday I finally tried reinstalling Java, only the 32-bit version this time since I no longer had to install 64-bit for Serviio on Windows 7 to work, and it's still running great. I haven't changed over the WinXP PC yet, but I'm very hopeful this is going to fix the problem there too.

Just thought I'd post this update in case it might help anyone else experiencing unexplained high CPU usage for Serviio.

Well that lasted almost 3 weeks at least. Yesterday morning I noticed high CPU usage and once again it's coming from ServiioService.exe*32. I've been keeping the resource monitor running always in the system tray so I could tell immediately if I was hitting the high CPU usage again so it was noticed right away. I haven't updated Java or changed anything in Serviio during that time. When I stop and restart the service to clear it, within 2 hours it's back up to 80%+ CPU usage, even when not not viewing any shows or movies at all. There might have been Windows updates and my AV program and that's about it, but Serviio Service and Console are both excluded from AV monitoring.

Unless anyone has any other suggestions what I can try to pinpoint what could be causing this, I'm going back to 1.4.1.2 and likely will be staying there permanently.