Massive CPU & RAM Usage - Long Processing Time

[nebutron]

Using the latest AUR developer version (1.0.1.r3.g621) (on Antergos Linux) the program opens and runs just fine but after I am done recording and the encoding/processing occurs my system comes to a halt.

My CPU is at 99% (intel i7 4770K Quad Core) and my RAM which would be 3/16GB is now using 15/16GB. It then takes almost 5 minutes (if not longer) for the recording to actually finish processing.

The video ends up being fine, but I must say it being 15MB is a bit much (not sure if this is related to the issue or not). I know of other software that does the same thing and the same length video would be 1.5MB.

Hoping there are some logs I can find for you to help you figure this out. Let me know!

[phw]

Yes, this is already known and there are a couple of issues about this already. It comes down to imagemagick's cinvert using basically all the resources it can get when optimizing the final GIF. Looking into how limiting the resources for convert affects the processing is on my to-do list.

I would be really curious which software that is you claim produces GIFs only 10% the size for the same recording.

[nebutron]

That is good it's being looked into. Really need to have this working.

As for the size. I mention it in the sense that I know it is possible, but it isn't a software available for Linux so it isn't really comparable (also not open source).

It's called CloudApp (getcloudapp.com). It does a few things, but selecting an area, recording it (either as gif, or video) and then auto uploading with a link. All takes a few seconds.

Now obviously the sizes do vary depending on how long, but I have downloaded quite a few of them to see the size and the largest was 30MB, but the average was 2MB.

Your recording may be higher quality though (but I'd say hard to tell). So I think ultimately what I would like to see would be a quality option. Turn it down kind of thing to be faster or higher quality.

(getting off topic now I suppose)

[phw]

What you can currently do is turn down the framerate. For a lot of recordings you can get away with 7 or 8 fps and still get decent results (it is an animated GIF after all).

But there is definitely room for improvement and this is planned for the 1.1 release. Currently I am just tight on time again and this needs some playing around with different settings, so not sure how long this will take :)

[nebutron]

Does the same issue occur on the non developer version? Heavy system use and all that? As you know, I started another ticket for the regular version about it not launching. If I can get it working, just curious if it has the same problem here.

[phw]

Currently there is not much difference between the development and stable version, so yes, same issues apply. It all comes down to ImageMagick's resource usage here :(

[nebutron]

Thanks. I will keep using this version then.

I hope it can be fixed soon-ish :)

[diwu1989]

When the convert command is called, i think we should be passing in memory limit to be a sane amount, such as 64MB

see documentation on -limit
http://www.imagemagick.org/script/command-line-options.php#limit

peek/src/post-processing/imagemagick-post-processor.vala

Lines 38 to 42 in c0300fd

	"convert",
	"-debug", magick_debug,
	"-set", "delay", delay.to_string (),
	"-layers", "Optimize",
	"-define", "registry:temporary-path=" + temp_dir,

[phw]

@diwu1989 Yes, definitely the resource limits have to be set, see #112 . But definitely not 64MB :)

Evaluating and testing this is on my todo list for the next release

[diwu1989]

Right, as long as it doesn't eat up 4GB on a machine that only has 8GB of ram, thanks

I also wonder if we can tell Imagemagick to be more lazy about optimization, I don't necessarily care as much about the file size, but more about the speed.

Graphicmagick might also be a good alternative to imagemagick for performance speedup

[pohmelie]

This is huge problem, and should be fixed with highest priority. Cause app became unusable. My ubuntu freeze for more than 10 minutes and it looks like it wont stop soon.

[RobertMatkulcik]

Same problem here...

[trelemar]

Stopped using Peek because of this. Sorry devs, my computer freezes if I record a gif > 30 fps and longer than like 8 seconds.

[phw]

I am currently very tight on time, I hope I can work on this soon again. Sorry for the long time without update on this.

Given the comment of @trelemar I just wanted to point out that recording GIFs with 30 fps or more is probably a bad idea, unless you keep it very short or small. You will quickly end up with a file of several hundred megabytes in size, I don't think this is of much use. There is a reason why the default is 10 fps. Personally I would recommend a framerate between 8 and 15 fps.

If what you are recording really requires a framerate that high use a proper video format, Peek supports WebM and MP4.

[xereda]

What strikes me is the performance of the "recordit" app (Mac and win). It manages to generate animated gifs, with HD resolution, and still upload to your server. This all without consuming too much processor and machine memory. Maybe it would not be worth a study on him !?