Question/help:Local browser stream freezes

[jacampb2]

Hi folks, I have kind of an odd question. I have zoneminder installed on a older Dell pe2950, 2 quad core xeon processors and 32gb of ram and 4 bonded gigabit nics.

I've got zoneminder working on 3 ip cams. I'm running modect on the low res sub streams and capturing the high res streams on alarm. All of that works fine with a system load of less than 2 in zoneminder console. I can open zoneminder from any other machine on my network and can watch the high red streams with no issue.

The problem is on the local machine. If I point a browser to 127.0.0.1/zm, I can view the low res substreams with no issue. If I try to view the main streams I sometimes get a single frame and then all 8 processor cores make their way to 100% and the entire interface becomes unusable. If I simply close the browser and reopen, system resources return to normal until I try to open any main stream again.

On any other device, including my phone, I can watch the high res streams and the server processor usage barely twitches. It's there any advice you can point me toward? I'm not sure if this problem is unique to me, or if I'm just searching the wrong terms, but most threads I've turned up are about streams freezing on remote machines.

Thank you,
Jason

[dougmccrary]

The server simply can't keep up with recording, encoding and decoding that much bandwidth.

But why? My z400 6 core is at less than 50% with 14 lower res - how high res are your cameras? Browser?

[jacampb2]

The cameras are 4k, but I've set the primary streams to 1080p 25fps The substreams are 640x480 20fps.

I initially set this up on a very low power Nas and the high res streams choked it while trying to do mocord on the streams directly regardless of if I was trying to view the streams or not. That is why I moved it to a much higher power machine and switched to doing modect on the sub streams. That's working perfectly, it is probably could have run on the old hardware.

It seems that the same amount of local resources would be used whether I'm viewing on the server or on another network machine. I'm not really that familiar with how the video encoding /decoding works. My suspicion is that the client side does decoding of the live stream, so maybe that accounts for the extra load on the server.

I've been using Firefox on the server running zm. I mostly use Chrome on other devices. I intend to add at least 6 more ip cams to the system. Honestly this isn't really a big deal, I'm curious as to what the issue could be and it would be nice to get it working, but it's not going to kill me if it doesn't.

[dougmccrary]

My suspicion is that the client side does decoding of the live stream, so maybe that accounts for the extra load on the server.

Yes. You could try a different browser, but I used FF too, so may not make a difference.