Too many packets in event queue

Wowza Streaming Engine
1

My customer experienced once again a problem earlier where the scheduler did not pick up a change in the streamschedule.smil file to change from playing an mp4 file to a live video. That is a problem that from previous conversations is not going to get sorted so my hourly play of a live camera stream across my 50 cameras seems the only solution to that one without a developer to fix the issue inside Wowza.

However I have now seen another error while searching the logs to try and narrow down the above error.

LiveStreamPacketizerBase.addPacketizerEvent: Too many packets in event queue, pausing

This has only appeared in the logs over the last 48 hours so is not the cause of the original problem, but may have had an input to it on this instance.

Firstly what does the error mean? I have checked all of my webcams and from what I can see they are working fine. I searched the forums and found this post related to a similar problem : https://www.wowza.com/forums/showthread.php?20029-Java-heap-exhaustion-problems but I am not experiencing any Java issues as can be seen below :

Date : Thu Nov 8 14:14:03 GET 2012

Survivor 0 used % : 100.00

Survivor 1 used % : 0.00

Eden spaced used % : 73.13

Old spaced used % : 77.10

Permanent spaced used % : 59.78

No. young GC events : 53748

Young GC collection time : 9129.664

No. full GC events : 18841

Full GC collection time : 2086.229

Total GC collection time : 11215.893

The Survivor space percentage can be ignored as that is a transient area which flip-flops between 0 and 1 so I dont think thats important and its been like that since before this problem occurred.

Please let me know what other information you require. I will take a copy of the logs anyway so I have.

2

Just double checked and there is an error in my above statement.

This has appeared in the logs since 14:03 on 02.11.2012 so is not the cause of the original problem, but may have had an input to it on this instance. I should also point out that Wowza was restarted on 05 November 2012 01:35 with the error appearing in the logs both before and after the restart.

An understanding of what it means would be appreciated.

3

a problem earlier where the scheduler did not pick up a change in the streamschedule.smil file to change from playing an mp4 file to a live video.

The problem might be client. First they should refresh the client after the change is expected. If they see the live video, this indicates that the encoding difference between the file and the live stream was too much, perhaps audio codec difference, which the client cannot handle the abrupt change.

Otherwise, the scheduler logs changes. You should see the change in the logs. If not, perhaps there is a typo in the date string.

Wowza logs may show WARN or ERROR messages that are routine, and not affecting streaming. The switching problem is most likely codec changes.

Richard