Question / Help High CPU Usage

[Reese1]

I've been having a problem with my OBS for about 4 weeks now. OBS when I'm viewing my CPU usage is running at anywhere from 15% to 20% usage. Which brings my overall usage up to about 30% - 50%. Every time I try to go live, it spikes even higher causing my CPU Usage to go above 60% and even to 100%. I have completely done a new OS install, I have checked all my plug-ins and drivers. I even completely deleted and uninstalled everything related to OBS & stream labs. After that I did a fresh install and watched my CPU as I re-input all my scenes and streamlabs widgets and it was fine.. CPU stayed at 20% and OBS was running at about 4%. This morning I woke up and it's back to doing the same high CPU usage.. I have no idea what to do at this point. I have tried everything and we have ruled out my CPU as being the issue already, as well as many typical settings.
I have also tried using scene collections as someone suggested, didn't work. I also reverted to an older version of OBS and it still happened.
Any help on this would be appreciated beyond belief. Thank you for your time in advance.

Here is my last log for you: https://gist.github.com/fe1755698e602384599d8e3bae799b4f

 

[Rodney]

Have you tried duplicating your current scene collection (Scene Collection->Duplicate) and then deleting sources one-by-one until the CPU usage goes down again?

 

[Reese1]

Yes. We also did the fresh install and input the scenes one by one and the CPU was not affected either way. It didn't go down any less when we were deleting them and when we completely deleted all OBS scenes, documents and streamlabs files and reinstalled them, OBS was fine. We had no CPU issues after the install until this morning.

 

[Rodney]

I assume "until after this morning" also means "until after a reboot"? Since it is Windows 10 and it has some sleep weirdness, have you tried doing a reboot instead of shut down + power on?

Have you also checked if the same happens with a completely empty scene collection? (Also restart obs after switching to an empty collection).

Sounds like something is stuck in an infinite loop, but it is hard to say what.

 

[Reese1]

Yes, we have done that as well. :/

 

[Reese1]

Honestly, we did EVERYTHING we could think of / anything suggested to us before I came to the forum :(

 

[Rodney]

Please avoid double posting, use the editing functionality instead.

I don't have many ideas left. This seems to be a pretty obscure issue. The only remaining things I'd try are:

* Disable all audio devices (in obs' settings) and restart obs, see if that causes it
* If you have the Killer network software installed, remove it.
* Check if your CPU is thermal throttling (i.e. downclocking) or some power saving feature is interfering
* If you have any anti-virus/anti-malware solution other than windows defender, try removing it (some are known to cause issues)

Maybe someone else will chime in, but please understand that that might take some time as the forums are not that active at all times. You can also try chat again but describe your issue in more detail, e.g. that it is something happening after a reboot after installing, not related to any specific sources (since you've tested that). Maybe someone there has an idea.

 

[Reese1]

Do you actually work for or on OBS? If not, you seem to spend a lot of time on their forums and stuff. (Maybe you SHOULD work for them, lol)
I've got a list of about 5 other broadcasters who are having these same exact issues who have also done everything I've done and we don't have any of the same programs or builds.

 

[Fenrir]

Do you actually work for or on OBS? If not, you seem to spend a lot of time on their forums and stuff. (Maybe you SHOULD work for them, lol)
I've got a list of about 5 other broadcasters who are having these same exact issues who have also done everything I've done and we don't have any of the same programs or builds.

Nobody "works" for OBS, we're all community volunteers. OBS isn't a company.

The only thing I can think of is that you have a lot of USB devices, which could potentially be causing problems if the USB headers are being overloaded.

Try using this tool and see if you can spread them out across multiple root hubs: https://obsproject.com/downloads/usbview.zip

 

[Reese1]

Nobody "works" for OBS, we're all community volunteers. OBS isn't a company.

The only thing I can think of is that you have a lot of USB devices, which could potentially be causing problems if the USB headers are being overloaded.

Try using this tool and see if you can spread them out across multiple root hubs: https://obsproject.com/downloads/usbview.zip

Okay.
I mean, I've had the same amount of devices since I started broadcasting over a year and a half ago and this was never an issue before. This just started 4 weeks ago.
And the same broadcasters that are having the same issue? Should I suggest they all try the same thing? I'm trying to get others to come forward about it so I don't look like the only one having this issue.

(and I meant work for as in like.. work on the software itself.)

 

[Fenrir]

Okay.
I mean, I've had the same amount of devices since I started broadcasting over a year and a half ago and this was never an issue before. This just started 4 weeks ago.
And the same broadcasters that are having the same issue? Should I suggest they all try the same thing? I'm trying to get others to come forward about it so I don't look like the only one having this issue.

(and I meant work for as in like.. work on the software itself.)

So, let me try and shed some light on our inability to be direct on the issue.

10:52:38.777: Output 'simple_stream': Total encoded frames: 136939
10:52:38.777: Output 'simple_stream': Total drawn frames: 136939
10:52:38.777: Output 'simple_stream': Number of lagged frames due to rendering lag/stalls: 2 (0.0%)

This right here is the total amount of frames that OBS was asked to encode, with any errors or issues it encountered doing so. In almost all cases, any CPU or GPU performance problems will be reflectd here. The two frames lagged is irrelevant, and the majority of the encoding went fine. This means that OBS is working properly, so whatever the cause is likely to be outside OBS itself, and when dealing with that we can only do our best educated guesses.

I guess the question I have is, are you actively having any issues outside a noticed increase in CPU usage? That might give us a hint on what's going on.

 

[dodgepong]

I would also add these lines from the log, in the profiler:

10:55:42.247: obs_video_thread(16.6667 ms): min=0.236 ms, median=0.989 ms, max=246.617 ms, 99th percentile=4.196 ms, 99.9973% below 16.667 ms
[...]
10:55:42.248: video_thread(video): min=0 ms, median=0.689 ms, max=6.79 ms, 99th percentile=2.078 ms

In order for OBS to render/encode at 60fps, it needs to process each frame in 16.667ms or faster. These profiler entries show that pretty much every single frame is being processed much faster than that, which further confirms what Fenrir posted.

In other words, OBS itself seems to be performing perfectly well from this log. OBS using 15-20% of CPU actually sounds pretty normal to me for a 720p60 encode.

What actual problems is the increased CPU usage causing for you?