Question / Help OBS Studio lagging NO STREAMING (both program itself and entire system, PC unusable)

[Hunkstaban]

Hey lovely people,

I ran into the strangest problem today.
While researching why my display capture would break every stream for no apparent reason, I somehow managed to make the issue worse, and having OBS open now lags out my entire system. All sources in OBS lags, and using my computer while OBS is running is a horrid experience, as just surfing the web is slow, lagging, and awful.

I made sure to backtrack all the changes I'd done since working on resolving the display capture issue. A lot of forum posts suggested it was using the wrong GPU, so I added OBS to nvidia control panel settings, which I initially thought caused the issue. I later removed OBS from the nvidia settings through a third party application, since nvidia doesn't let you remove programs after adding them. I backtracked all the settings I'd changed in the BIOS, I reinstalled OBS, I downloaded the latest gfx drivers, but NOTHING has resolved the issue.

There must be some kind of bottleneck happening, but I can't for the life of me figure out what is causing it. I can have zero programs open, but OBS still lags out the system and itself. I am not streaming/recording, I don't have any games running, or any other performance intensive programs. It just happens seemingly for no reason, and I'm bound to believe resetting windows is my only available option at this point.

Looking at task manager CPU and GPU usage doesn't exceed 15%, so it doesn't seem like bottlenecking is happening, but clearly it does.

Hope someone can help.

Specs:
i9-9900k
RTX 2080
32GB RAM

Log file attached

 

[koala]

You created some duplicate display capture sources that capture the same monitor. If you need to capture the same monitor multiple times for multiple scenes, add the additional captures with "add existing" instead of "add new". With "add new" you add a complete new capture
instance for that monitor, and more than one will stomp on each other. Only one of them will display a picture, the others will be black.

With "add existing" you create an additional instance of an existing capture and all instances of that capture will be able to display a picture.

If you need different filters in each instance, don't apply the filter directly to the display capture, because with "add existing" the filters will be inherited by all instances. Instead, put the display capture instance into a group (can be the only item in the group) and apply the filter to the group, not to the display capture.

This is not addressing your lag problem, but the lag problem stems from the huge collection of sources and filters. Shrink your setup. Don't use so much filters. Use groups to group sources and apply filters to the group and not to each source individually.

 

[Hunkstaban]

Thanks Koala!
I removed the duplicate display caps - I'm usually pretty good and keeping just one source active and then making multiple scenes with that source to use the scenes as sources instead.

I did figure out the issue though - somehow my Cam Link was messing up everything.
I have no idea why and how, but removing the Cam Link source, unplugging and plugging the cam link back in and readding the source fixed everything.

Technology is such a fickle beast