Multimedia features started hogging cpu+memory

[dsmithdewarcom]

Hi,

I admin a QNAP TS-451 which we've been running as a RAID 10 (4 x 3TB WD Red), firmware 4.1.1 file server pretty much without any significant/unrecoverable issues since 2014.

Our users have mainly been accessing the server over AFP, and a few weeks ago began reporting intermittent dropped LAN connections to the server.

Yesterday evening the file server became unusable for all users, due to network access issues.

This morning I rebooted the NAS, and it gave a "File system not clean" warning, so I ran the file system check from the web admin, which completed without errors.

All seemed ok for about an hour, then the network dropping started again. The web admin was showing very high cpu and memory usage, the latter spiking to ~100%, all due to ffmpeg. Apparently a backlog of ~32K files were in need of thumbnails, including some very large image files running into 100s of MB each.

When checking the Control Panel/Station Manager, I discovered several services running, including Media Library, DLNA Media Server, File Station, Standalone Web Station, and Background Transcoding. Killing these services restored normal resource usage (CPU & memory) of the NAS.

Is there any reason why these services would spontaneously start running and/or progressively hogging resources out of the blue?

Thanks for any insights!

[dolbyman]

those services should switch themselves on out of the blue , were any changes done ? firmware updates ?(your firmware is outdated by several years)

is the NAS exposed to the web ?

[dsmithdewarcom]

Had no issues with the firmware, so haven't updated. The NAS isn't exposed to web, it's lan-access only.

[dolbyman]

have you tried to disable all multimedia functions ?

[dsmithdewarcom]

Yes, that definitely helped. The problem appears to have been settings lost on hard reset due to power out. It took me some time to reconstruct all the settings, get the desired services working, and disable the undesirables. Lesson learned: I saved the settings.

[dolbyman]

another lesson..get a ups