I've been trying to work this out for a while, have done a lot of reading, searching and testing and I think it's about time to ask the experts and also make sure I don't have unrealistic expectations of performance!
I started by running ZoneMinder v1.25.0 on Debian Wheezy x64 as a guest on an VMWare ESXi host with an Intel Core2Duo E7500 @ 2.93GHz with 4GB of RAM. I have four camera's Hikvision DS-2CD2032-I and I was getting smearing, generally of the bottom part of the images. It occurred to me the system might be maxing out, so I checked via some of the Atop, Htop apps, etc and CPU was hitting close to, if not 100%. They are set to MODECT, so I guess there's a fair bit of processing.
I had another Intel Core2Quad sitting around and also wanted to make sure it wasn't just because it was running on a VM and same thing. Maxing out the CPU,although picture quality normally pretty good. Recently built a new system for my parents house and thought I'd give it a test to see how that performed, considering an upgrade for myself. That's an Intel i7-4790 Quadcore 3.6GHz, with 8GB of RAM and the CPU gets maxed out as well.
In all cases running Debian Wheezy 7.6 x64 and I've tried 1.25 and even gave 1.27 a shot as well.
Cameras are set to 1280*720P @ 10FPS / Variable Bitrate - Max 4096 / Video Encoding H.264 (no other encoding options)
In Zone Cameras are configured as Ffmpeg / Modect / Max FPS still set to 26, but shouldn't reach it as I dropped it in the cameras / source Path rtsp://username:password@ipaddress/streaming/Channels/1 and 24Bit colour with same resolution as the cameras are configured with.
On a side note, I've heard of people greatly improving their performance by using libjpeg-turbo which I downloaded and installed on my system from SourceForge (libjpeg-turbo-official_1.4.0_i386.deb) however it installs libjpeg.so.62 in /opt/libjpeg-turbo/lib64 and my Debian 7.6 x64 already has libjpeg.so.8 in /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu so symlinking doesn't seem to be an option.
For RAM have set in etc/fstab
tmpfs /run tmpfs nodev,nosuid,size=50%,mode=755 0 0
I would've expected a bigger improvement in the faster systems, so I either have unrealistic expectations, or I'm clearly missing something... and most likely obvious! I'm fairly comfortable with Linux, but wouldn't say I've got great troubleshooting skills, especially where it comes to performance, or bottlenecks which I think may be occurring and then it's placing extra strain on the CPU and masking the issue.
Sorry about the long post, but just wanted to include all the info in one hit to make it easier to spot my mistake!
Lastly, absolutely love ZM, so if I can sort out this issue will be *VERY* happy! Will be donating regardless anyway as it's great work and needs some support.
Any suggestions appreciated
