Anyone using dual P3 1.4 ghz servers?

[Amanda]

I've setup ZM on a P3 server running Fedora 6 and it seems to
be a great software so far. It's an ex web server with 2.5gb ram
and running dual 1.4ghz P3 Tualatin CPU's.
I have a lot these servers and would like to make use of them if
possible. The capture card I have is a generic 4 chip BT858 that was
about $30. My goal would be to support 12 cams running 5-10fps on
the card I have or maybe a pv-183 from bluecherry. I realize it
might be a stretch to get 12 feeds out of the existing card.

I have one analog cam running at 30fps b/w 340x240 modect and it runs
fine but when I switch to RBG and anything over about 1 to
3 fps it crashes Fedora. I've increased the shared mem and monitored
top but I don't see a huge cpu/mem overload right before the crash, it
just crashes when there is a lot of movement.

I assume it's related to fps and mem/cpu overload but since these
servers do so well at mysql/httpd serving I'm wondering if I need to
look further to see if I can resolve it. I'm an experienced linux admin
but I'm wondering if anyone has a similar setup and if they might have
some easy things to check/tune/update.

Thanks everybody.

[cordel]

As I recall both FC5 and FC6 had some issues and I don't recall if they were corrected with updates. One has a bash flaw and the other had perl issues I think.
You can likely find the posts by Googling around the ZM forums. I just remember skipping packaging for those distros's since they had so much trouble with ZM I didn't see the point in dong it.

You might look into Debian or if your a RH'er like me CentOS is a great way to go for a headless install.

Something to check is dmesg, make sure the card is recognized and the drivers are not throwing errors.

You should be able to get 90 fps I think with that server fairly resonably, though it really depends on how it's configured.

[Amanda]

Good to know there were issues with FC5/FC6 thanks!

It's a fully updated FC6 system so the problems may not have been
fixed. I may jump to FC 10, just did not want to take the time. FC6 was
very solid for what we used it for (web/mysql server) so I was hoping it
was something easy.

I don't do Debian as Fedora is like a comfortable sweater where I know
where all the buttons are I might try CentOS if FC10 has issues.

All our Fedora servers are headless... are you saying there is something
better about CentOS as a headless server? Just curious if I was missing
something good.

Thanks for the info on fps... if I can get 7.5fps over 12 cams that would be great.

[cordel]

CentOS is basically Red Hat EL Server.
So if you know your way around Fedora, it's basically the same, just not as many packages available as there is in Fedora. CentOS also has long support cycles, so you don't lose the ability to update packages that need security fixes after a year as the fedora cycle does.

[carbon]

I’m using a dual p3 with 1.0 xeons, debian and 2gb ram whilst I was testing cameras etc I had no problems with 4 cameras at 20fps. As I’m a novice with linux there may be a better way to set the system up but the hardware seems to be coping ok at the moment.

[Amanda]

Thanks for the info about CentOS and P3's. I was not able to install FC10 on
my server because of driver issues so I'm going to try another old Compaq server I have.

I'll update everyone on how it runs, maybe there is some interest in using old hdw for inexpensive security systems.