Need Hardware Advice

[Acewiza]

After getting ZM where I want it with 12 cams, 8 Mocording, 4 Monitoring, it's hammering pretty hard. I noticed the high resource utilization right away, but this is crazy:




I'm guessing the multi-server setup comes into play somewhere around the 20-cam point, without severely restricting bandwidth and frame rate. Is there any sort of hardware requirements formula or baseline specs? Any anecdotal stories from large installs? This one is all default, with the exception of increasing buffers on the cam configs. The OS cannot be tuned any tighter. I was gonna build another 7/27 3rd gen machine when I get around to it, but now I'm wondering if I should go bigger, just for a little overhead space?

You can feel it bog a little at the console when it gets busy now. It won't run more than one properly-resourced Windoze VM acceptably, without stopping ZM. -32gig RAM with swap disabled, all NVME/SSD. I can't imagine it would run at all on 16gig with spinning discs and swap enabled.

[alabamatoy]

There needs to be some standard way of gauging CPU and NW load, perhaps there is and I just dont know about it.

I have 3 ZM instances running, the most recent is 8 cameras on a 8 core I7 with 16GB RAM and the webmin load is showing between 10% and 20% CPU on that box. I expect it should support about 20 cameras before the load becomes an issue. The CPU, fan, motherboard and RAM were all bought through Amazon and Newegg and totaled <$600 (reused box and hard drives from previous server). The choke point is the external Internet, lots of "ERR Unable to send stream frame: Broken pipe" which I think is going to be changed from ERR to INFO in future release

A lot of the load is motion detection, and the ZM modect in my experience just isnt able to cope with outdoor video in most cases. The rate of false positives is ridiculous. So I think the secret sauce is in tools like YOLO and the event server, offloading object detection onto a big GPU, ignore the birds and alert on humans etc. I have yet to venture into that, but its where I want to go.

HTH

[Acewiza]

Yes, motion detection seems the biggest issue. It's plainly obvious with what appears to me to be near linear load increase whenever it gets windy or rains.

[Acewiza]

I would never presume to look at the code. I'm lucky if I can write a decent shell script every once-in-awhile. But I would suggest any devs working on motion detection focus on things like categorizing and ignoring.

(Late Update) Sorry, but I have to rescind the above comment. I never bothered monitoring it on just record. Motion detection probably has it's own unique contribution to the load average, but in record-only mode the thing just pegs a "little" lower and sits there. Not good.

I guess nobody wants to admit it takes a monster machine to run this with any more than a handful of cams.