Darkice high cpu after 15+ hours

[csmith00]

I run Darkice on Ubuntu 11.04. I noticed that after 15-18 hrs, Darkice runs at 99% CPU. Restarting Darkice clears the issue and puts CPU at less than 10%. Anyone running Darkice see this before?

 

[BD-Engineering]

Darkice high CPU usage after over 35 hours extremely light use.

Hello,

It seems years later the problem still exists.

Approximately 11PM on the 15th of June, 2013: I finished installing Ubuntu 12.04 LTS on a SFF PC with a 3.0Ghz Pentium 4, I updated all packages, installed Icecast 2, checked to see if there were any more updates, installed Darkice, and everything seemed to work well by midnight, and even still by 3AM on the 16th.

After a reasonable day broadcasting to a few people for a few minutes each, and myself for a few hours, Everything still seemed fine. (Yes, I did sleep between 3AM and 9:30AM on the 16th)

However, this morning when I came into work (17th of June, 2013) I immediately HEARD the fan from the streaming machine from the front door of our office suites! I walked straight to where the noise was coming from, in the main studio cabinets.... I was upset that the machine was working so hard it's fans were all at 100% speeds, but soon happier that the OS had not crashed. I opened a console and typed "top" to see what was so demanding on the CPU.... 99% CPU time was going to darkice with the same live feed being sent to the icecast 2 server as always.

We are talking a 64kbit OGG stream... nothing complex, like multiple bitrate streams...

I have yet to tail the logs today, but I was wondering if anyone knew if the problem is Ubuntu, Ogg Vorbis, or a problem with P4 CPU's? (or something I have not yet thought of?)

I think it was still capable of streaming, but I did not try before issuing "killall -r darkice"....

The fans started spinning down almost instantly, and returned to near silence in under a minute.

I then restarted darkice via a shortcut to my bash script that starts darkice and puts it in the background so the console window can be closed... (is that a possible problem?)

I can post my script if anyone is interested... it just saves a few keystrokes to launch, then close the console window after echoing running status and waiting a few seconds so users can view the text... nothing exotic.

I am thinking I need to do cron jobs every 12 hours to kill darkice and respawn it... that's acceptable for our 10KW AM station.

Anyone know what the cause of the CPU usage is?

Thanks,
Aaron

 

[aaknitt]

I don't have an answer, but I noticed something similar running darkice on a raspberry pi, so I'm using cron to restart every night as a workaround. I'd be interested in a solution if anyone has one.

Andy

 

[BD-Engineering]

I was getting ready to move the streaming to my new Pi, which is why I was testing on an old PC first.

Too bad you have noticed the same issue in Raspbian also...

I had thought of the same work around, but wondered if enough of us have this serious problem, if the devs would not maybe want to actually FIX it right.

I am not a programmer, though I don't have any issue compiling, and running programs via cli if I have to, and vi is almost as close a friend as sudo these days...

I would rather PAY someone else to actually fix darkice than try myself.

For those who would say I should learn to program, I am... starting with ansi C... I have to start somewhere.

In a Windows or DOS environment I was fairly proficient in quickbasic, but even that was years ago.

More importantly, software should just work..... though there's nothing wrong with learning more than you want to know to solve little issues.

(I'd not call suddenly going from 4% CPU usage to 99/100% after a certain number of hours a small issue - After hours it could run for 9-10 hours stressing the CPU and all the components in the case that really don't like that much heat)

Anyway, for now a cron job is the temporary solution...

Thanks aaknitt, and how do you manage it? (a script to killall -r darkice followed by restarting darkice?)

Just wondering.

I also noted that it still serves audio to icecast 2, and other tasks seem to start pretty much as fast as if darkice were not even running - meaning the 100% CPU usage is not really true, other than the heat output)

Anyone else have a solution?

 

[aaknitt]

I only noticed the high CPU load on the Pi once. After that I added the cron job and haven't seen it since. I'm not sure if that's because of the cron job or if the high CPU I saw once was a fluke. In any case, my cron job reboots the entire Pi (sudo reboot), not just darkice, and then I use a separate cron task using @reboot to start it automatically when it comes back up.

Andy

 

[DC31]

I only noticed the high CPU load on the Pi once. After that I added the cron job and haven't seen it since. I'm not sure if that's because of the cron job or if the high CPU I saw once was a fluke. In any case, my cron job reboots the entire Pi (sudo reboot), not just darkice, and then I use a separate cron task using @reboot to start it automatically when it comes back up.

Andy

Andy,

I have been running darkice on a pi nonstop for weeks. No, one reboot when my wife tripped the ground fault on the circuit. I have seen absolutely no problems with it. How do i determine the cpu load on the pi?

Make that two reboots. A tree at the end of the driveway took the wires down another day.

Thanks

Jim