ZoneMinder Forums

Hi Guys,
I am looking for some help to fine tune the zoneminder settings as the server we are using is having memory problems.
I
I have zoneminder 1.25 installed on the lastest version of debian x64.

The server hardware details are:
2x 6 core intel 2.6 X5650 CPU
24Gb Ram
3.5Tb Raid 10

We are currently recording movement from 17 IP cameras, with the Max FPS set to 5 & alarm set to 10 FPS.
As I am writing this we have about 87mb of 24Gb free, which is not enough.

If anyone could give me some advice on my setup that would much appreciated & if you need any more details please don’t hesitate to ask.

I'm not sure that is enough info without your individual camera settings.

What seems to eat up all the available RAM on the system is the buffers. You could try reducing "Image Buffer Size", but it still needs to be around 2x "Pre Event Image Count" as per most recommendations.

Some people have solved odd camera problems by having very large Image Buffer Size settings. For me it did in 1.24.x, but things are better with normal numbers for me in 1.25.x

FYI: On an AXIS megapixel, I'm running Buffer = 85, Pre event image count = 40. Runs great, but haven't experimented with lower numbers.

Compared to other systems I've used on Windows, Zoneminder uses a LOT more memory.

Mr.Ziggy wrote:I'm not sure that is enough info without your individual camera settings.

What seems to eat up all the available RAM on the system is the buffers. You could try reducing "Image Buffer Size", but it still needs to be around 2x "Pre Event Image Count" as per most recommendations.

Some people have solved odd camera problems by having very large Image Buffer Size settings. For me it did in 1.24.x, but things are better with normal numbers for me in 1.25.x

FYI: On an AXIS megapixel, I'm running Buffer = 85, Pre event image count = 40. Runs great, but haven't experimented with lower numbers.

Compared to other systems I've used on Windows, Zoneminder uses a LOT more memory.

All of my camera's (Axis) are running with Buffer = 40 & Pre event image count = 15.

Should I increase both the Buffer & Pre event count?

Fragile wrote: Should I increase both the Buffer & Pre event count?

NO! First understood what these settings are. With an buffer your system keeps 85 images into the RAM memory before the are droped or recorded at an event.
the PRE and POST buffers are the count of images that are recored before of after an alarm frame. (example: an pre buffer of 25 frames and post of 50 frames with an camera at 5 frames second gives an extra recordtime of 5 seconds before the alarm event and 10 seconds after the event).

So try to minimise the Buffer to an low setting that don't show frame skips in your event. and google the forum for shared memory settings.

Running a ipcs -l on the server provided the following results:

------ Shared Memory Limits --------
max number of segments = 4096
max seg size (kbytes) = 32768
max total shared memory (kbytes) = 8388608
min seg size (bytes) = 1

------ Semaphore Limits --------
max number of arrays = 128
max semaphores per array = 250
max semaphores system wide = 32000
max ops per semop call = 32
semaphore max value = 32767

------ Messages: Limits --------
max queues system wide = 32768
max size of message (bytes) = 8192
default max size of queue (bytes) = 16384

Zoneminder was also configured with mapped memory enabled.