Machine spec recommendation needed

[PCMedicJAX]

I am building a dedicated zoneminder system to support 8 cameras. the cameras are 2.0MP LTS
The hardware I have is a DELL Optiplex 390 with an i3 proc and 4gb RAM Can upgrade to 8GB MAX. I have a 500GB OS drive and 4TB secondary drive. I am running Mint and ZM 1.32

Is this enough system to handle this reliably?

[bbunge]

Ditch Mint desktop and use a basic Ubuntu Bionic server. Use Mariadb server in lieu of Mysql. You may have to give Mariadb more resources, innodb_buffer_pool_size, once you accumulate events and start with lower resolution to get it running. Increase resolution a bit at a time and watch shared memory usage. Also recommend ZM 1.33.x. Easy to install Ubuntu from a net install CD and install "/" to the 500gb and format/mount the 4tb as /zmstore at install. I did this recently on a couple of i7 Dells with 500gb os drive and 2tb storage. Yes, upgrade to 8gb RAM.

[Andyrh]

My experience with similar HW.

HW details
Ubuntu 18.04 server
Gen1 i3 3Ghz (I do not remember the exact one)
8GB RAM
10k Boot drive
7200 data drive
1x 3MP camera (10 FPS)
2x 4MP camera (8 FPS)
All cameras modect
Zoneminder 1.32 stock install

This setup would tend to drop the frame after the event detection and frequently have buffer overflow errors because it was late processing the frames. All minor and I ran this for a year.

In my experience the CPU and RAM are the most important.

I hope this helps.

Andy
o||||o

[iconnor]

Isn't an i3 1 real core, 2 hyper threaded cores? As such, it is pretty weak. If it has 2 real cores then it might JUST be able to handle 8 cameras.

[CountyLine]

I too thought the old i3s were limited to two threads, but the "renewed" Dell Optiplex i3 that I found listed on Amazon the other day has two cores and four threads, which surprised me. Some buyers are using them as media servers.

No idea if the OP's machine is the same.

[bbunge]

The Optiplex 380 is a bit old and was originally specked out with a Core 2 Duo processor. Someone must have replaced it with an i3 wich may work OK with just 8 cams at low (640x480) resolution and 5 FPS frame rate. Actually, this is enough for a good security server. Just don't expect it to run a Linux desktop, too. One plus is the two hard drives, one for OS and database and the other for storage. However, the 3 Gb/s SATA bus is a bit slow by today's standards.
I would,'t buy an Optiplex 380 but might use it if it was given to me (but I'd look for something a bit better).