If you are experiencing a situation where the system running SAFR Server is unresponsive and the hard drive is showing excessive disk usage, you may be able to correct this by disabling antivirus software, Windows Search, or other processes that index or scan your hard drive.  

This issue may occur on Linux as well if there are processes such as virus/malware scanners or if you've enabled indexing for fast search.

If this issue is allowed to persist and write times are delayed significantly, system instability may result due to an accumulation of memory in writing images when large event volumes are experienced. Long write times can be confirmed by inspection of the cv-object log file looking for write times greater than 500 milliseconds.

Root Cause

The excessive drive usage and sluggish performance may be occurring because another process is scanning new files added by SAFR, thus consuming all of the computer's processing power. SAFR records hundreds or thousands of events even on relatively small deployments. For each event SAFR must store event image files (15-50k in size) as well as metadata objects (a few bytes in size).  This volume of objects, as well as the rate at which they are written, can result in slow performance if SAFR Server isn't running on a sufficiently fast drive or on a drive busy with other activity.

Resolution

To correct this issue the process that is scanning the disk should either be disabled or it should be configured to ignore files in the SAFR Object Storage directory. The SAFR Object Storage directory is called cv-storage and is located in the SAFR data directory (by default C:\ProgramData\RealNetworks\SAFR or /opt/RealNetworks/SAFR).

On Windows the most likely cause of this problem is either an antivirus software running that's running (e.g. Windows Antimalware) or the Windows Search Service. Exclusions for the SAFR Object Storage directory (mentioned above) should be added to prevent the scanning of this folder.

In a pinch, Windows Search can be easily disabled through the Windows Services Control Panel. If you merely set the Windows Search Service to "Manual", Windows Search will be restarted by other processes. Instead, you must set; the Windows Search Service to "Disabled".  

Other processes such as virus scanners should be configured to ignore the SAFR Object Storage directory.