Storage server over NFS - performance

[petrmaje]

Hi All,

I am playing with multiserver ZM. Everything works pretty fast, but I have performance problem with storage server over NFS. Storage server is connected over dedicated LAN as recomended, machine is relatively fast, it's old IBM server with SAS disks. I can't reach more then ca 4FPS, when saving events. I tried also some NFS tunning, as rsize&wsize change, but the result is more-less the same.
Has anybody experience with storage over network? What about samba?

Petr

[knight-of-ni]

We need more details than what you've stated. You haven't really told us what the problem is. If you want a more precise answer, you need to tell us things like:

How many cameras do you have and their resolution?
How fast is your ethernet link?
What makes you think the perceived problem is due to NFS performance?
What is the load on your server like when things are normal and also when things are not normal (i.e. > 4 fps)?
What happens exactly when you increase the frame rate past 4fps? What are the symptoms?
When you change the frame rate, you have to do that in the camera, not zoneminder. Ignore this and you are guaranteed to have problems.
When things are not working correctly, do you see errors in the zoneminder log?


Because iSCSI uses block transfers, it will always get you the best performance, followed by NFS, then SMB (samba).
Many NAS products, like FreeNAS, support all three of these options out of the box.

I don't use NFS for my zoneminder event storage, but when I use NFS for other purposes, I get good results with these options "rw,hard,intr,rsize=32768,wsize=32768,noatime,nodiratime,nfsvers=3"

[petrmaje]

You are right, this is not NFS issue. Everything works perfectly now. Everything is about hardware. I tried two kameras, 1280x720 and 640x480, 10 FPS.
As a second experiment I used BananaPI with WD black disk and everything works perfectly now!!!
Thank you for your tips!

[knight-of-ni]

Two cameras at 10 fps sounds like a reasonable maximum for a bananaPi. As with all the little computers that have come into the market over the last few years, you need to watch your resources all the more closely since cpu horse power, memory, and disk i/o are in high demand.

[petrmaje]

When 1.29 comes with multiserver, it seems to be ideal solution for these small ARM computers. It's good idea to have SQL server separately from image processing machines as well as the storage. I have really nice results, everything is balanced and works fast.
I'm using RPI3 for image processing and BPI R1 as storage, SQL and switch between storage LAN and videolan. It really works better than our old all-in-one server

[knight-of-ni]

Glad to hear someone has that working in a microserver environment. I've just not had the time to set that up.

In a future release, zoneminder will have the ability to record events to more than one storage location, so you will also be able to distribute the storage if you want to.