ZoneMinder Forums

I just want to know which version of Ubuntu works better with ZM and multiple cameras. I have 2 servers (almost identical hardware) and one of them I had 6 cameras with ubuntu 12.04, working fine, then when i upgraded to 14.04, I had problems getting all 6 cameras to work properly, so I downgraded back to 12,04 and able to get all the cameras working again.

So now on one server, I am using ubuntu 12.04 with ZM 1.28.1 and 6 cameras, all of them ps3 eye cameras... my secondary server is running ubuntu 14.04 with ZM 1.28.2 and 3 ps3 cameras and 2 ps2 eyetoy cameras.

With my 14.04 server, I am trying to take out the ps2 eyetoy cams and have all PS3 cameras like I have on my 12.04 server. For some reason I can only consistently use only 3 of the cameras and the other 2, either not working at all or sporadically cutting out. so I am wondering if there is something I can tweak or should I just downgrade this server to 12.04, even tho that version is not supported anymore?

If I remember correctly there may have been some changes in mapped memory from 12.04 to 14.04. Since you state that the hardware is similar you may want to check if 14.04 is using more RAM for tempfs. By default Ubuntu, recent versions, used half of the memory for tempfs or RAM disk. This can force your system to use disk swap which is normal but can slow things down.

I'm running 17 IP cameras on a quad core with 10 GIG of RAM. I have limited the amount RAM /run/shm can use (currently 3 GIG).

There are also some tuning tricks you need to run to keep things running. Mysqltuner is one to use to make sure your database server is not running out of resources. innodb_file_per_table is also recommended. I'm approaching 60K events so have had to increase the innodb_buffer_pool_size and a couple of other MySQL settings. noatime in your /etc/fstab for your main partition can take some write functions from your hard drive.

I plan to stick with 14.04 for a while on my production machine. At least until the next LTS version comes out.

I do a lot of testing and feel that Debian Jesse (8.2) may be a bit speedier than Ubuntu especially if you use MySQL 5.6. I also feel that Ubuntu 15.04 is great as it uses systemd. But, support for that is limited...

The other advantage of 14.04 is you can get updates to Zoneminder. With 12.04 you are stuck with what you have or you will have to drop back to 1.25.0 if you need to reinstall.

bb