Router causing bandwidth issues for Local IP Cameras

A.Hruskach · February 5, 2020

I have 4 x POE IP Cameras going into a gigabit POE switch, then the switch uplinks to the router. The second port from the router then goes to my desktop PC which records the cameras.

Will connecting the PC's ethernet cable directly to the switch with the 4 cameras instead of the router solve bandwidth issues for just the IP cameras?

I already adjusted the bitrate and resolution of the cameras from 1080p30 @ ~8000Kbps to 720p15 @ ~2000Kbps. Even with that dramatic change the cameras still lag and have frequent fps drops and dropped frames.

My pc has handled all cameras at full resolution before with the same configuration, but I am not sure what has changed.

Refer to image below for my current configuration.

Note: All LAN ports on each device is in use as shown in the image.

Windows7ge · February 5, 2020

You can try it if you like but my expectation would be that it won't make an improvement. There's well in excess if available bandwidth (unless the router is 100Mbit). Sounds like the issue is something else. What exactly I can't say.

Might try unplugging 3 cameras and see what happens as you add each camera. How the problem changes. May just be one camera doing something weird.

dalekphalm · February 5, 2020

54 minutes ago, Windows7ge said:

You can try it if you like but my expectation would be that it won't make an improvement. There's well in excess if available bandwidth (unless the router is 100Mbit). Sounds like the issue is something else. What exactly I can't say.

Might try unplugging 3 cameras and see what happens as you add each camera. How the problem changes. May just be one camera doing something weird.

Good suggestions. I'm more inclined to think it's probably the PC. @A.Hruskach I would check CPU usage and HDD usage on the PC when all 4 cameras are recording footage. Even at max bandwidth, 4x 8Mbps = 32Mbps (4 MB/s).

So even if the Router is limited to 100Mbps, you'd still have around 2/3rds spare bandwidth for other traffic. And any HDD, even an older one, should be able to handle 4 MB/s of disk recording.

So my suspicion would be that the HDD is going bad, or there are possible issues w/ the OS itself (possibly other hardware failure).

But, also follow @Windows7ge's advice, and test each camera one at a time, to see if you get the same issues on one of them. If each one individually works fine, pair 2 together. Then 3, etc. And see if you can pinpoint exactly what combination is causing the issues.