Extremely Slow Response

[cosmarchy]

Hi,
I'm very new to ZM so I thought i'd play around with it a bit and see what it's all about and I am getting extremely slow response.

I have a virtual machine running with 2 processors and 2 threads per core giving me essentially 4 CPUs (according to linux anyway!!). The virtual machine is running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS with 2GB RAM.

I installed ZM as per instructions here: 'Ubuntu Server 14.04 64-bit with Zoneminder 1.28.0 the easy way' from the User Specific Install Guides on the wiki - the only thing I didn't follow was giving a static IP address, which means I am using localhost/zm/.

As for the camera, I have a Microsoft LifeCam Cinema HD capable of 720p video @ 30 fps.

All installs correctly, or so it seems anyway. I can access the ZM control screen and create Add a New Monitor which by default comes in with a Width of 320 and a Height of 240. When I go to monitor, I usually get some video around 9 to 12 fps. The main point here is I get something. Occasionally I don't get anything, and 'ls /dev/vid*' tells me there is no video device detected so all I do is unplug and plug in the camera and it ZM works again - not sure whether this is a 'feature' of it being a VM but i'll try and sort this out later....

Now, on to the problem. I thought to myself, i'd like a bit higher resolution so I edited the monitor and changed the Width to 640 and the Height to 480, and then attempted to view the camera again. Everything ground to a halt. It took ages to refresh the webpages and there was no camera image.
Although the System Monitor graph on the Resources tab shows one of the CPUs is 100% whilst the others have the occasional activity, I cannot see 100% worth of processes on the processes tab but there are lots (20) apache2 processes doing nothing that I can see. It is only using 800MB from the 2GB available. Swap is sitting on 0.

I cannot see why changing the resolution should prevent an image from displaying and I cannot see why the system has gone unresponsive either.

Does anyone have any experience with this?

Thanks

[bbunge]

I am the author of the "easy" instructions. Am setting up a VM to try to see if I get the same problem. Initially, I too can not see the USB camera in the VM. Likely operator error or configuration error.

Is your VM on Linux or Windows?

bb

[cosmarchy]

Hi bb,

I have a Ubuntu 14.04 guest VM running on a Windows 7 host.

In VM Workstation 10 (which is what I am running) you have to click VM > Removable Devices, find the camera and connect to guest, if that is any help?
If the VM already has focus and you plug in the camera, it automatically attaches to the guest, I believe.

Thanks

[bbunge]

I got ZM to work in a VB on Ubuntu 14.04 desktop with the same processor and memory configuration. Used a Logitech USB camera and got the resolution up to 640x480 and was streaming just fine. Next will try it on a Windows machine with VB.

bb

[cosmarchy]

Out of curiosity, which VM are you using (a VMWare or VirtualBox) for example. I wonder if this has made a difference?????

I would try and hook up the webcam on the laptop monitor to see what that can do. Might be the camera, perhaps lol

[bbunge]

Virtualbox. Got it running on my Linux desktop but VB is giving me issues on Win 8.1. Had to go back to an older version to get 64 bit to show and now it is giving grief about VM not enabled in the BIOS.

[bbunge]

I finally got Virtualbox running on my Win 8.1 PC and added a VM with Ubuntu 14.04-1 64. I even installed ZM and got the USB camera working... Then VB threw a fit over a USB error and crashed the PC. Have spent the evening doing a system restore to get rid of Virtualbox and get my PC to start "normally."

My guess is that there is a disconnect with your USB camera. I did have problems when I tried resolutions above 640x480. Of course the camera may not be able to do more than 640x480.

Back to VB on Ubuntu. Next to figure how to upgrade to MySQL 5.6...

[cosmarchy]

arrrggghhh, I've almost given up

First I've tried connected the inbuilt webcam. Unfortunately the VM refuses point blank to disconnect from the host and connect to the guest, so that's a day wasted.....

I had a brain wave, or so I thought. I've a Tenvis IPROBOT3 so I thought i'd try and connect to that.
I would have posted the site where which details what steps I have taken but when I put the URL in here, apparently is it too spammy.
I thought I had it running, but when I went to monitor the videostream all I got was a blue screen with the timestamp in the top left corner.
A look at the logs reveals two recurring entries:
1) Unable to get response
and
2) Invalid response status 401: Unauthorized

To me this looks like authentication issues, but I made sure and doubly sure the username and password was correct, so now I'm not so sure.

Not having much luck with ZM lol.

Thanks for having a look BTW