Zoneminder with 50 ip cams?

[freak]

Given a beefy server... can zm scale to 50 ip cams running at 320x240/greyscale with motion detection?

If answer is yes next question is how much beef would that take?

An old spreadsheet I used for zm 1.25 indicates the following:

Pixel Width: 320
Pixel Height: 240
Total Pixels: 76800
color bits: 8
Bits per frame: 614400
ring buffer: 40
bitpercamwithringbuff: 24576000
cams: 50
bitstotal: 1228800000
bytes 153600000
KB: 150000
MB: 146.48
MB Rounded up: 147
shmmax bytes: 154140672

adding in 10%:
suggested shmmax in bytes=169554740
suggested shmall in pages=41396


I was looking at this system: HP ProLiant DL585 G7 Rack Server System 4 x AMD Opteron 6282 SE 2.6GHz 16-Core 128GB (16 x 8GB) No Hard Drive 653745-001 at newegg.

[mastertheknife]

ZoneMinder 1.26.X includes lots of performance improvements that i wrote.
depending on your fps, i believe it can be done.

mastertheknife

[freak]

Sorry I didn't specify the frame rate. I would like at least 5fps. Anything above that would be great as well. In alarm mode I have run them up to 15fps.

[knight-of-ni]

Yes, that 16 core Proliant should do fine.

However, here are a couple of things worth noting:

• Mapped memory is the norm now so you do not need to tweak shmall/shmax
• Zoneminder does not have the ability to change the framerate of IP cameras. The Maximum FPS and Alarm Maximum FPS fields are designed for local cameras only and should be left blank for IP cameras. Unless this ability is built into the camera itself, there is no way to dynamically ramp up the frame rate when in alarm.

[freak]

Yes, that 16 core Proliant should do fine.

However, here are a couple of things worth noting:

• Mapped memory is the norm now so you do not need to tweak shmall/shmax

I remember that now.

[*]Zoneminder does not have the ability to change the framerate of IP cameras. The Maximum FPS and Alarm Maximum FPS fields are designed for local cameras only and should be left blank for IP cameras. Unless this ability is built into the camera itself, there is no way to dynamically ramp up the frame rate when in alarm.[/list]

That I did not know. Doesn't zm limit the number of frames it grabs from the camera by that setting?

[freak]

Yes, that 16 core Proliant should do fine.

Actually 4x16=64 cores!

[knight-of-ni]

That I did not know. Doesn't zm limit the number of frames it grabs from the camera by that setting?

Frame rate setting must be set in the camera. Alternatively, you can set the frame rate in the url if the camera supports that.

If you try to limit the frame rate by using the Maximum FPS fields, you may notice the following issues:

• Some motion events not being recorded (because zoneminder is dropping the frames that contain the motion)
• Long delays (~30 sec) between what is happening in front of the camera versus what is shown on your monitor. I'm at a loss as to explain this one, but it is caused by putting values into the Max FPS fields.

[freak]

So with an IP camera zm is motion processing every frame? (30fps in this case)

[mastertheknife]

I am working on adding a way to maintain fps for source types that we can't control the stream speed (IP cameras), but it might take some time.

For source types that we are the ones initiating the capture (e.g. USB and analog cameras), we are the ones controlling the fps because we are capturing only when we want.
But for source types that we are not initiating the capture, but simply receiving data (IP cameras), we have no way to control how fast the sender is sending the data. To only way to maintain fps in this case is to simply ignore some data (drop some frames), which is what i am working on.

But i agree with others, your hardware is more than enough for this. The only bottleneck you might have is with the hard disk.

[freak]

Ok thanks. Is there a forumla for disk space? I tried some rough calculations and for 30 days I came up with 4TB. It may be close but I'd be interested in knowing the correct way to do it.