Settings for camera that will use less RAM?

How much memory is SecuritySpy using? It changes based on what you’re doing. My memory usage goes way up and I get the same message when I try to use the browser to play saved footage. Otherwise it only uses a few hundred MBs. Camera settings shouldn’t make much of a difference. And any camera setting that does help probably just degrades your audio or video quality.

Did Ben tell you which app was using a lot of RAM?

Here is a look at mine. Right after starting it, then attempting to play captures from 2 cameras, and then attempting to play video from 4 cameras. SecuritySpy and VTDecoder go nuts. Eventually I’ll get the need more memory emails like you.

https://imgur.com/a/1B806YV

The features in SecuritySpy that use significant RAM are as follows:

• Pre-capture, under Preferences > Cameras > Motion Capture (best to keep this to 3s or shorter)
• Instant video replay, under Preferences > General (turn this off if you have RAM issues)
• Every camera stream that comes into SecuritySpy that needs to be decoded (can't really avoid this)
• Any video window that is displaying live video (so keep these closed when not using)
• The AI-based smart object/motion detection (you may want to revert to standard motion detection instead)
• Any camera that has recompression enabled under Preferences > Cameras > Device (so make sure this is all turned off)
• Playback in the Browser
• Encoding video for sending via the web interface.

Unfortunately, even a few running apps can consume the meagre 8 GB RAM in these machines. And remember the RAM is shared between all systems including GPU. My general advice would be to check the above settings to make sure these are all within reasonable ranges, avoid using video windows too much when not needed, and reduce camera frame rates.

Hi @Senna_F1 - compared to QuickTime Player playing back a few files, the Browser in SecuritySpy has to do a lot more work as it has to put together day-long compositions containing all the video data for the day. This allows it to smoothly transition from one file to the next as it plays. Perhaps it is this aspect of how the Browser works that is using a lot of memory and leading to poor performance. For this task, SecuritySpy doesn't handle the memory management directly but rather this is done by Apple's AVFoundation code. I wonder if there is a way for us to tell AVFoundation how to cache data or use RAM more efficiently - I will investigate this. Meanwhile, could you please send a screenshot to support@bensoftware.com that shows the memory usage of SecuritySpy and the VTDecoderXPService when playing back footage in the Browser. Please also send a debug file so that I can check your recording settings (SecuritySpy menu > Debug submenu > Create Debug File On Desktop).

Apologies, you did indeed post screenshots above. I'll look into ways we can economise on memory usage in the Browser. The problem is that even though only one file is being played at any one time in the Browser (or two if two cameras are selected etc.), the Browser is first creating day-long compositions that contain the footage from the whole day so that playback at any point during the day, and moving from playing one file to the next, can be achieved seamlessly - it seems like it could be this that is using the memory (I'm wondering if the underlying Apple framework that is responsible for maintaining the compositions could be attempting to load all files from the whole 24 hour period into memory).

If you look at the captured files in the Finder and locate an average day folder (i.e. a folder with the name in YYYY-MM-DD format that contains files for a whole day), how large are these folders roughly?