ZM performance issue

[zm_tester]

I have installed ZM 1.21.3 on Fedora 3.

Hardware:
Dual Xeon 3.0G, 2G RAM

I have another 16 machines (Celeron only) which has 1 camera attached and ZM installed. Then I added the 16 cameras to the Xeon machine. When I play back the stream from Xeon machine, the Xeon machine extremely high CPU loading. From "top", I find most of the loading from ZMS processes which should be streaming to client machine.

1. How to optimize the server to support 16 cameras with good performance?

2. Usually by using Xeon, how many cameras can support?

[ma77hias]

What kind of cameras are you using:
Network/IP Cameras or
Video Cameras with Capture cards
(If capture card, which capture card)

What resolution are you using 640x480 ? FPS ?

As a first thought, i would check if your system is swaping. If you don't have enough RAM and your system needs to start swaping this will add to your CPU load.

[jameswilson]

what you classing as high load?

[zm_tester]

1. I am using analog cameras connected to 878 chipset capture card on single machine. Total there are 16 such kind of machines. Then I added those 16 machines to a dual xeon machine to manage all 16 cams.

2. for server loading, i type "w" in linux, the loading always over 10. In term of cpu time, average less than 10% cpu time is idle. Most of the cpu is used for "zms" and "zmc" processes.

Additional questions:
1. 878 chipset capture card is software based capturing card. If I changed to total hardware based card, will it be better in performance?

2. is zm benefit in SMP under Linux?