Occasional watchdog timeouts on netcams

Question

I have motion setup to monitor a bunch (18) of network cameras. Occasionally a thread dies with a watchdog timeout. Unfortunately this causes all the viewers watching the motion feeds to stop so this is a significant hassle. Any ideas why this is happening and what can be done to prevent it?

The webcams are various Axis models.

I don't believe this is caused by loss of connectivity. When I see loss of connectivity I get a "Video signal lost - Adding grey image" message which does not cause problems with the viewers.

Errors logged are:

Oct 10 23:52:05 server motion: [0] Thread 14 - Watchdog timeout, trying to do a graceful restart
Oct 10 23:52:44 server motion: [14] netcam camera handler: finish set, exiting
Oct 10 23:52:44 server motion: [0] Motion thread 14 restart
Oct 10 23:52:45 server motion: [14] Resizing pre_capture buffer to 1 items
Oct 10 23:52:45 server motion: [14] Resizing pre_capture buffer to 2 items

Environment

Motion version:	motion-3.2.12-8.el5
ffmpeg version:	ffmpeg-0.10.2-54.el5
Libraries:	ffmpeg, mysql, postgresql
Server OS:	CentOS 5, 2.6.18-308.4.1.el5PAE

-- JeffSiddall - 11 Oct 2012

Answer