Encoding overloaded with low CPU usage

TuNeXiZz

New Member
Hi,
I use OBS to record Zoom meetings. As the encoder I use the x264. The problem is that I regularly get the warning that the encoding is overloaded although the CPU usage is around 70% for all threads. So I am not quite sure what's bottlenecking. Obviously I could lower the FPS / output resolution even more and switch to a faster encoder but I'm not sure why this problem occurs in the first place. In the log file you can see that in the first recording attempt with 1080p I lost nearly a third of all the frames. When lowered to 720p it was down to 6.3%. Between the two attempts the CPU usage didn't really change much. Any idea why this is happening?

Thank you!
 

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TuNeXiZz

New Member
I noticed that every time I open a new site in chrome the overload happens. Although there is enough RAM left, could it be that the speed at which it operates is to slow? As it has to clear out some of the stuff that's in the standby area, the read / write speed might be maxed out when filled up with the new website. Is that a thing? I'm just guessing. The RAM is a DDR3L-1600 with 11-11-11-28 timings.
 
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payday0023

New Member
Very similar problems here. OBS is fine (very few dropped frames, around 2% or less) if nothing else is happening, but switching to Chrome and it spikes to over 50 or 60% dropped frames and the recorded file is noticeably choppy
 

konsolenritter

Active Member
Cause you haven't a usuable gpu all stuff is concurrent running for cpu ressources. And context switching in chrome may block the system for a couple of times. Thank Microsoft and the software engineers for that. RAM doesn't help at all in these situations.

You may try to start OBS with admin privileges and have the settings->advanced the priority of obs set to "higher than normal". Hope that helps a bit.
 
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