ZM Light Weight Settings

[gbeyer]

Hello, I have ZM 1.26.25 running on a new, fairly beefy (for Linux) laptop, monitoring only one camera. ZM brings it to its knees to the point that I can do almost nothing else on the laptop. Core i5-1135G7 2.4Ghz, 12GB RAM, TB hard drive. LinuxMint Mate 20.3. I've had to resort to stopping ZM via terminal, then everything else returns to running smoothly. It's a hog as it is now. Edit: Quantifying "hog" means zmc process is using 40% CPU, sometimes approaches 50%.

I would like to make ZM as light weight as possible. What settings can folks recommend to reduce ZM's demands on my system?

Thanks,
Greg

[Andyrh]

Camera passthrough comes to mind. I run 6 cameras with modect on an older CPU and only get it to 50% most of the time.

[gbeyer]

Thanks very much @Andyrh! I searched for where/how to set camera passthrough (haven't found it yet) , but found the Tips section at https://wiki.zoneminder.com/Dummies_Guide.

I applied the tip to limit analysis FPS 1-2 FPS. That immediately reduced zmc CPU from 40-50% to a steady 32%, sometimes down to 28%! So this is already a great improvement, and my system is behaving much better.

I can't find where to set camera passthrough -- hint please?

[Andyrh]

It is in the camera settings on the storage tab.

[haus]

I have two monitors set up for each camera. A low-res monitor (640x480, or whatever depending on your camera) for modect, and a high res linked monitor in 1080 or 4K set to nodect, so that when motion is detected on the low res image, it automatically records the high def version as well.

Based on a recent post, I tried setting the low res cameras to black and white, but I didn't see any notable change in CPU load.

[Andyrh]

IMO 640x480 on a modern CPU is trivial. As you can see in my signature, I am doing modect on less than new HW and 2 of the cameras are 8MP. I have room for more cameras.
Also, are you making it B/W on the camera or ZM. If I am not mistaken ZM will spend a few cycles dropping the color if you are doing it in ZM.

[gbeyer]

Andyrh, I found, set the settings per your guidance. See attached shot to confirm nothing else needed. CPU is still steady at 32%, no reduction there, but RAM use is now lower, went from 363MiB to 244MiB, so also an improvement. Thanks very much!!

Screenshot at 2022-09-07 18-52-43.png (23.1 KiB) Viewed 2153 times

[Andyrh]

Save JPEGs takes some CPU and lots of disk space. I only turn it on when needed. You should see if that helps your CPU usage with it off. It will help the storage.

[gbeyer]

Thanks for that. CPU remains the same, 32%. I'll watch disk, hope as my daily clean-ups run that storage utilization goes down.
Is there some place that explains what each of these settings does -- and the trade-off for disabling, or for other options within?
There seem to be hundreds of options within ZM.