zma eating a LOT of CPU in 'Record' mode with no zones configured - why?

[LinuxJack]

Hello,

I have a ZoneMinder install, 1.29.x (from apt install on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS), running 5 cameras (a mix of Mobotix and ACTi). I have set the system up on a paradigm where I just record everything at a modest frame rate (2 per second), and I have my own bash scripts that use ffmpeg to turn the image sequences into MP4's for archival purposes. In other words, my need/want for ZoneMinder's analysis engine to do anything here is 0. In watching the system, I observed that the zma process (the Zone Minder Analysis daemon, if I understand correctly) consumes more CPU than all the other processes on the system combined (by about double). It's not enough to totally kill the system, but as I am planning to add another 5 or 6 cameras, it is some concern as there seems to be one zma per camera running.

So in looking to disable it, I deleted all the zones for all the cameras thinking that with no zones defined, what would it analyze? When that failed to bring satisfaction, I set all my cameras to 'Record' mode, in which mode the documentation says ZM does not do any analysis. That, likewise, yielded no satisfaction.

Am I missing something in my quest to disable the analysis engine? Is zma doing something that's not analysis that I'm not aware of that should be consuming that much CPU?

Please advise, if you folks would be so kind.

Jack

[nbi]

Similar problem, but even worse. With Debian 9 (i.e. Stretch - stable distro) zoneminder while idling (just zm console - not looking at camera output) is raising my CPU temperature because it consumes a lot of CPU cycles. What on earth is it doing while idling that's consuming so much CPU?? The culprit is "/usr/bin/zmc -m 1" running as www-data. Is this a 1.29 only problem or does 1.30 have this issue too?

[Baylink]

zmc is the capture daemon; it pulls frames off the camera or capture board, and writes them to disk. You might be able to do without zma, but you couldn't do with zmc.