Near-constant encoding overload

[goodwarrior12345]

Hey everyone,

A really frustrating issue came out of nowhere recently and I've spent the past few hours trying to fix it. No matter what I do, my GPU encoder gets completely overloaded and I don't get why it would do that. I've tried bringing my game's graphics settings down, bringing my encoder settings down, rolling back to an older OBS version, different Nvidia driver versions. Nothing makes sense.

Here's a log with an example of the issue: https://pastebin.com/g2uMxM9c

I've been keeping an eye on my task manager during that particular OBS session. The GPU usage graph is... interesting to say the least: https://i.imgur.com/F9A4ddx.png
Also, if it gives any clue as to what might be happening, when I tried capturing the screenshot with ShareX, there was a gap of like 10 seconds between me pressing the screenshot hotkey and hearing the capture sound effect, and that screenshot actually getting saved. Not sure what I could do to troubleshoot the problem further.

 

[Cyberpyrot]

im having the same issue the maximum I can record for youtube it 1440P when I go to 4K it gives me that error

 

[goodwarrior12345]

I've tried 1080p and 1440p, both cause issues with overloading for me

 

[koala]

According to your task manager screenshot, the usage of disk D: is 100% (whole graph is filled) while you recorded. If this disk is too slow to save the generated video data stream, this can be the cause of your issue. My internal hard disk D: just scratches the 1% mark if I record a video of similar resolution and quality as yours to it.

 

[goodwarrior12345]

According to your task manager screenshot, the usage of disk D: is 100% (whole graph is filled) while you recorded. If this disk is too slow to save the generated video data stream, this can be the cause of your issue. My internal hard disk D: just scratches the 1% mark if I record a video of similar resolution and quality as yours to it.

thanks for the reply! Yeah I noticed that as well since having made the post. Tried recording onto my SSD (my C drive) and had no issues even with high GPU load. Checked my hard drive with Defraggler and turned out my hard drive was at 43% fragmentation. Currently defragmenting, I'm assuming that's probably the reason for my troubles, since it wasn't a problem before and now it suddenly is (I've always recorded onto my HDD in the past). Fingers crossed, hopefully it fixes the issues. My random access speed was something like 3 MB/s I believe lol

 

[koala]

Checked my hard drive with Defraggler and turned out my hard drive was at 43% fragmentation.

43% fragmentation cannot happen if you use Windows out of the box with its automated defragmentation (takes place once a week) and if you make sure the disk has reasonably sized free space. Uninstall any 3rd party defragmenter (snake oil alert!) and verify free space. Free space should be at least 10% of total disk space or at least the size of the biggest file you have on that disk, whatever is larger.

 

[goodwarrior12345]

43% fragmentation cannot happen if you use Windows out of the box with its automated defragmentation (takes place once a week) and if you make sure the disk has reasonably sized free space. Uninstall any 3rd party defragmenter (snake oil alert!) and verify free space. Free space should be at least 10% of total disk space or at least the size of the biggest file you have on that disk, whatever is larger.

I've defragmented the drive using the default Windows utility. Still running into issues, thinking that maybe my drive is at fault. I still don't understand it though. I ran a test just now where I first plugged in my old 5400 RPM external HDD and tried recording on it. No problems, everything worked fine. I then changed my file path to my internal 7200 RPM HDD that I've been using up until then. 22% skipped frames due to encoding lag. The rest of the log can be found here: https://obsproject.com/logs/p07obOJkeFLfg1mG

Is this something that's wrong with my hard drive? I really don't understand why it would do this. I ran CrystalDiskMark and the speeds shown seem more than good enough for recording purposes: https://i.imgur.com/E0k5fyg.png

For reference, here are the results for my external drive: https://i.imgur.com/gBvDUGU.png
as you can see, it's got significantly lower read/write speeds, and yet I'm seeing no issues in my tests. Although I guess the random writes are a lot lower on the internal drive, now that I look at it. Shouldn't OBS be doing sequential writes though?

All the drive health checks I've run so far have failed to show any issues. Here's my CrystalDiskInfo screenshot for example: https://i.imgur.com/Pma47Sz.png

Why would it do this? And just to reiterate, these issues have only started recently, in the past couple weeks or so. Everything was completely fine before. I'm not seeing any other programs overload overload my drives with reads/writes while recording or idling. Am I just screwed and do I have to buy a new drive?

Maybe I'll try connecting it to a different SATA port and possibly run some tests from my Linux dualboot, see if it's a Windows-specific issue or not. Feeling very lost/confused at the moment.

 

[goodwarrior12345]

OKAY I SOLVED IT! Plugging my HDD's SATA cable into a different port fixed everything. I wasted so much time on this only for it to end up being a port/cable issue, Jesus Christ...
Here's what my CrystalDiskMark results are now: https://i.imgur.com/5LHrTnn.png
They jumped up a bunch, as you can see.

Also, here's my current log file: https://obsproject.com/logs/7EjfqdyWw7TDWKxl

Figured the cable/port might have been the issue once I saw my Transfer Mode inside CrystalDiskInfo listed as SATA/150 out of a maximum of SATA/600. It says it's using SATA/600 now, finally. Not even going to begin to wonder what could've caused a decrease in speed/transfer mode, because if I wasn't having these issues before, the SATA speeds must have been fine in the past.

Well, maybe at least someone facing similar issues will find this thread helpful at some point in the future. Thanks for trying to figure it out with me you guys.

 

[koala]

Great that you kept researching for the solution and finally found it! (and this is a real solution, because you found a real fault, and you did the right thing to correct the fault. Often people randomly try enabling/disabling things and declare an issue fixed, although it isn't actually fixed)

It may be that the SATA port isn't actually defective but the cable wasn't correctly plugged in the mainboard or the disk, or the cable has some issue itself.
This may be also be the cause for the fragmentation, because the defrag process stops if you shutdown your computer and doesn't resume with the next reboot.