Is ZoneMinder still a CPU hog?

[Tantamount]

Many years ago ZoneMinder would eat up 100% of the CPU when running. I think I remember the author stating this was by design, but I could be mistaken and it was just that the processor I was using at the time wasn't able to work hard enough to satisfy the needs of the program.

Can anyone confirm what type of CPU usage they see when using this? I've tried many of the other surveillance software out there, but nothing has the great features of this software and I would love to start using it again if it won't trash my power bill.

[rockedge]

Running on a old Gateway Pentium D 820, CPU 1 gig RAM, Hiawatha 10.0 server, MySQL 5.5.35-1ubuntu, ZoneMinder 1.29, the OS is Puppy Linux Tahr 6.0.5 CE. My current loads with 3 IP cams (Hootoo Foscam clones) are .25 .28 .22 Also running is a PERL daemon and a Python language driver for an X10 transceiver (CM19a) with X10 MS16A ActiveEye Wireless Indoor/Outdoor Motion Sensors. Here is a screenshot of htop running on the system.

[Nerre]

There are no shortcuts to motion detection but comparing images. And comparing images is CPU demanding. But CPUs today are more powerful than a few years ago.

What might lower zoneminders CPU requirements would be to store images as raw bitmaps instead of JPEG, but that would on the other hand increase disk usage to insane amounts.

[Tantamount]

Okay, so I've got my setup working now, and the cpu usage is crazy high (5 cameras). Except for one camera, my cameras are all 1920x1080, color 24-bit rgb. They're ip with h264, so I'm using ffmpeg to process the rtsp streams. (Using "remote" resulting in a ton of errors in the logs about decoding problems). Mind you this is when the monitors are only set to "monitor."

After enabling motion detection, the cpu usage doubled until I could set the analysis rate to 5 per second.

I'm uncertain how to get zoneminder to do the same for capture. Obviously I would like the full 30 fps when there's a trigger, so I have to configure the camera to send out at 30 fps, however, I'm uncertain how to get zoneminder to drop frames and only "capture" enough for analysis when there isn't a trigger.

Got any tips?

[PacoLM]

Running on a old Gateway Pentium D 820, CPU 1 gig RAM, Hiawatha 10.0 server, MySQL 5.5.35-1ubuntu, ZoneMinder 1.29, the OS is Puppy Linux Tahr 6.0.5 CE. My current loads with 3 IP cams (Hootoo Foscam clones) are .25 .28 .22 Also running is a PERL daemon and a Python language driver for an X10 transceiver (CM19a) with X10 MS16A ActiveEye Wireless Indoor/Outdoor Motion Sensors. Here is a screenshot of htop running on the system.

Hi,

Could you share the instructions about setting up Hiawatha server? I've tried my self in the past but was not able to have it working 100%, some functions were not working in my setup. What's the difference in CPU consumption compared with Apache?

Regards,

PacoLM

[rockedge]

@PacoLM
I found that the Hiawatha set up consumes slightly less CPU cycles then Apache. Big difference is the ease of configuration and security. I can write up the steps to install, the trick is in the configuration but it actually is not that involved to get it going. What functions have not worked in your experiments? Anyway I will look into my files for a set of instructions I typed up and posted on the Puppy Linux Forum. I could always set up a example and write a new improved version if your still interested.

[PacoLM]

@PacoLM
I found that the Hiawatha set up consumes slightly less CPU cycles then Apache. Big difference is the ease of configuration and security. I can write up the steps to install, the trick is in the configuration but it actually is not that involved to get it going. What functions have not worked in your experiments? Anyway I will look into my files for a set of instructions I typed up and posted on the Puppy Linux Forum. I could always set up a example and write a new improved version if your still interested.

I will really appreciate that. I tried to setup up Hiawatha months ago, so I do not remember exactly what was going wrong. I remember I was not able to make the montage view work, but there were more things...

Thanks!

Paco