Immich App Reaching 100% CPU on Raspberry Pi 4 (4GB)

Hi everyone,

I’m new here and eager to learn. Recently, I set up a local server with Umbrel because I found the idea of having a home lab with a user-friendly graphical interface to be brilliant. I installed Umbrel on a Raspberry Pi 4 with 4GB of RAM and added a 2TB Samsung Pro NVMe SSD, connected through a Ugreen case.

To store my photos and videos, I installed the Immich app. My wife and I have many photo and video files that we want to add to this server so that we can both access them. I installed Tailscale on our devices and started uploading the files. However, in the last three days, Immich has been consuming 100% of the CPU, which prevents me from doing anything else on the server. I have to stop the app to be able to use the server. I have already uploaded 100GB of photos and videos to the SSD via Immich, but now I can’t even start the app.

Has anyone else experienced this? Can you help
umbrel_immich_2024-07-01_00-16.log (103.1 KB)
me understand what’s happening and what I can do to stabilize the situation?

Thank you in advance for the support from the entire community.

Help

Hey @paulo.costa,

It’s awesome that you want to learn more about home-labbing and umbrelOS!

It’s possible the high CPU usage is related to the Immich server processing all the photos and videos you imported and from the logs it seems it is generating thumbnails and video previews.

This can be a computationally expensive process, particularly when you’re running it on a Raspberry Pi inside a container which may not have access to hardware acceleration and/or support for it may be limited.

From looking at the Immich documentation, support for hardware acceleration on the Raspberry Pi is not available yet so software encoding/decoding is being used which heavily taxes the CPU causing the problem you have described.

Given that you’ve uploaded 100GB worth of media, it could take some time for Immich to process all of it. You may be able to disable the thumbnail and video previews in the app configuration to prevent the processing from happening, but that could reduce your user experience in the Immich app.

1 Like