In a previous thread a couple months ago, I complained about how some actions on my NAS were abominably slow. That led to me reinstalling the OS and switching to QuTS Hero. Things were better after the OS install but still slow sometimes. This led to memory checks (all passed). Finally last night, I had a TeamViewer session with one of the QNAP techs.
He pointed out how when you run TOP on an SSH session to the NAS, that my NAS was showing values of 29 or 30 in the load average. He said that it should be less than 10. I thought the load average was CPU percentage. It’s not. It’s basically the number of threads waiting to be executing. Since my NAS had 8 logical cores, there were a lot of processes just sitting there waiting. So he began disabling things. When he disabled Container Station, the load average dropped tremendously. When we re-enabled it, it went right back up.
After our call ended, I started playing around with apps that depend on Container Station and found out that if I disabled QVR Pro, things worked a whole lot better! I tried out QVR Elite instead and still had the same problem.
With the surveillance apps disabled, I’m now getting load averages of 2 to 4 instead of being in the 20s or 30s. Big difference. So this brings me to my question…
Is it generally recommended to run QVR Pro or Elite on a NAS dedicated to just that app? How large of a NAS? I only have two cameras and only one is doing motion detection. But it drove the load way up. I have a TS-458 but I want to keep that as a backup destination and its CPU is generally swamped as it is so I don’t think QVR Pro would work on that. I was thinking about buying a smaller used system on eBay to run QVR and handle my cameras. Thoughts about what people do?
Hi, This is great and of course not great news. I was making myself nuts why I got suddenly a few months ago a really slow NAS; now I got a direction to check for.
I hope when you find out what to do you post it here for others, I can’t believe we are the only ones. Thanks for bringing me here.
According to QNAP Tech support, running cameras and recording video usually is fairly system intensive and typically requires a dedicated system.
That said, today I bought a used TVS-672XT on eBay. I think I got a steal on this NAS as it includes drives totally 46 TB of storage! Anyhow, now I will have two solid NAS units for all my backup and file sharing. I will attempt to dedicate my TS-451 to recording video from my two cameras using QVRPro.
For those who don’t know there is an Intel chip on the motherboard that fails in the TVS-?72 series. We had it happen to TVS-672N and were 3 months out of warranty. Paid QNAP $800. By now there are many on ebay offering repair for $3-400. If you have a local repair shop that can de-solder and re-solder the chip I think it only costs~$5 for the chip.
Thanks for letting me know. This item is said to have been barely used and factory reset. I will know in a few days. I paid $567 total with tax and shipping. Figured the drives alone are likely worth that much…
Well we shall see…Looking at the pictures on eBay vs. the pictures of current units from QNAP on their website, the back does look different. The one I am getting has audio input and output. QNAP’s website says that is no longer available on units made after 2021. So fingers crossed…
Is it generally recommended to run QVR Pro or Elite on a NAS dedicated to just that app?
If there are more than 10 cameras, maybe a dedicated machine would be more appropriate, but if you only have 2 it should be ok.
This the screenshot of my QVR Demo NAS, it uses QuTS hero OS and QVR Elite as the surveillance system, manage 16 cameras at the same time, but its load average seems fine…
Hmm. That is interesting. It definitely made a difference in my system load and I just have two cameras. What is the CPU in your demo NAS?
No matter. My TS-451 is now handling just video from the cameras and seems to work fine.
I’ve got the TVS-672XT now acting as my HBS backup destination. Plus since I run Hero on both the 873 and the 672, I can do snapshot replica.
The 672 was sort of a no-brainer for $500. It came with 5 Iron Wolf 8TB drives and one Iron Wolf 6TB drive. I’ve added a 6th 8TB drive so now I have plenty of storage space.
Well, I am glad you guys have good performance with QVR on your NAS while running other things. I don’t know.
I was trying to do some on the fly transcoding on my TS-873A and was having all sorts of issues. I had a ticket open with Paul from QNAP. He and I had a TeamViewer session and he’s the one who pointed out the very high CPU load (not CPU percentage but the Load values in TOP). It was like in the 30s. The NAS was very slow - very SLOW.
So he started stopping things. When he stopped Container Station, the load values dropped dramatically. He had me run some further checks over that weekend and get back to him. I have two apps running in containers and so it was either those or a Container Station dependent app like QVR Pro. I started Container Station and then stopped QVR Pro. My usage numbers when down again. Started QVR Pro and the numbers went right back up. Tried QVR Elite - same thing.
So I don’t know if it’s the combination or apps/services/etc I have running on my TS-873 but since I’ve moved QVR Pro off to my TS-451, the NAS performance has been SO much better. I have a flaky camera that regularly disconnects so maybe that’s it. Maybe it’s my motion detection settings. I don’t know. You guys say your numbers are fine, but it wasn’t my experience.
It runs fine now by itself on my TS-451. Sometimes the video is a little jerky but all in all it seems to be fine. Now that NAS is just dedicated to surveillance video instead of being my backup destination NAS. Now my backups are on my TVS-672XT. Everything seems to be running pretty well now… knock on wood!
