Upgrading Zoneminder on Debian (Buster -> Bullseye)

[michael.schefczyk]

Dear All,

My aim is to upgrade my Zoneminder server from debian buster to debian bullseye. Debian buster does work well running version 1.34.26. However, the remaining lifespan of buster is limited. For debian bullseye, I did try both versions 1.36.22 and 1.34.23. Unfortunately, neither version does work well.

My setup is:
- 2 ABUS cameras providing h.264 UHD streams at 20 fps. Continuous recording to an NFS mount.
- Cameras connected via powerline. This does occasionally swallow some frames, but without major consequences, at least with my traditional version.
- Virtual machines running on a Debian KVM host. Zoneminder VM has 6 cores, 8 GB RAM plus 8 GB swap. If RAM seems short (debian bullseye running ZM 1.36.22): 16 GB RAM plus 8 GB swap.

To create the VMs, I use ansible scripts. Hence, switching versions is not overly difficult.

Trying debian bullseye with 1.36.22, I did see many artefacts, particularly with fast moving objects, such as cars or bicycles crossing the zone. Such objects tend to appear in bold pixels dragging a trace of bold pixels behind them and crossing the zone multiple times in the recording based on only a single pass in reality. Static areas with low contrast do blink in terms of changing brightness and color/tone and moving from fine grain to bolder pixels and back. I did set the monitors to a maximum of 20 fps and 50 frames buffer with a MaxImageBufferCount of 300. Otherwise, the process tends to terminate because of lack of RAM. At debian buster, maximum fps is set to 30 with 50 frames buffer. MaxImageBufferCount does not exist in that version and it has no RAM issues at 8 GB RAM, while bullseye crashes at 16 GB RAM plus swap. So far, debian bullseye running zoneminder 1.36.22 is not usable in my setup.

Trying debian bullseye with 1.34.23, one does get good quality recordings, but live viewing does not work. The log contains:

Socket /var/run/zm/zms-xxxxxxs.sock does not exist. This file is created by zms, and since it does not exist, either zms did not run, or zms exited early. Please check your zms logs and ensure that CGI is enabled in apache and check that the PATH_ZMS is set correctly. Make sure that ZM is actually recording. If you are trying to view a live stream and the capture process (zmc) is not running then zms will exit. Please go to http://zoneminder.readthedocs.io/en/lat ... window-etc for more information.

Issues pointed out in the documents quoted, do not solve the issue.

/etc/apache2/conf-available/zoneminder.conf contains
ScriptAlias /zm/cgi-bin "/usr/lib/zoneminder/cgi-bin"

/etc/zm/conf.d/01-system-paths.conf contains
ZM_PATH_ZMS=/zm/cgi-bin/nph-zms

Changing the content of 01-system-paths.conf to the same content as zoneminder.conf does not make a difference. Looking at the directories, zms does seem to be present without obvious permission issues.

Would anyone please point me so the right direction?

Regards,

Michael Schefczyk

[dougmccrary]

Are your cameras using TCP or UDP? If you can get TCP, it's less load.
Can one camera run OK by itself?
Can you reduce the framerate in the cameras? Unless you're making a movie 6 - 10FPS is good enough. Same for UHD; would HD suffice?

[michael.schefczyk]

Thank you very much!

I am using TCP in all setups. The setup works fine on debian buster with 1.34.26. When switching to debian buster with 1.34, recordings are still allright, just live viewing does not work. As soon as I switch to 1.36, quality and memory problems start. That does take place even with one camera. Moving away from UHD would be least desirable, as cameras are security cameras and one should be able to recognize humans as best as possible. Then, I would rather stay with the current working setup based on debian buster for a bit longer.

I will reduce the frame rate to half the current rate and report back on that.