Excessive CPU consumption

[Kid Twist]

At times, CPU usage on the PC that houses my Subsonic server and music library jumps to 100 percent. I've noticed that this seems to happen when a user is streaming from a remote PC or phone. The jump seems to happen at the start of a track; CPU stays pegged at 100 percent for a minute or two before easing up. Subsonic's performance is not affected, but some of the other applications on the machine freeze briefly when this occurs. I've noticed that this doesn't seem to happen when the user is streaming MP3s; only files that require transcoding appear to cause this. So the obvious conclusion is that the transcoding engine is responsible for the excessive CPU consumption. Does anyone know whether it's possible to adjust anything so this doesn't happen? (It's a Windows 7 x64 computer, if that helps). Thanks!

[daneren2005]

Is your computer a multi core system? If it is, you can limit the transcoding to only use a single core with the -threads paramater. For example, this is my current transcode string:

ffmpeg -i %s -ab %bk -v 0 -f mp3 -

You should be able to change it to:

ffmpeg -i %s -ab %bk -v 0 -f mp3 -threads 1 -

Which should make it so that it only takes a single core instead of as many resources are available. I don't believe the transcoder that Subsonic uses supports CPU limiting though.

[Kid Twist]

Thanks very much for the response. Unfortunately, it's a single-core machine (an older desktop PC that I repurposed for use as a media server).