ZoneMinder Forums

Im currently running a P4 2.0, 640mb ram at the moment. 3 camera's at 352x288 analysing @ 10fps and recording at 25fps.

At the moment the system constantly uses about 50mb of swap so it's just baring the loud, crank up the resulution any further and it chokes.

Simply buying more RAM would seem the easiest option but this computer is an old RDRAM machine and the memory for it costs a fortune, so im considering going for a system overhaul to replace the cpu/mobo/ram for something more powerful and cheaper in the longrun.

Ive seen a few people mention dual-xeon systems which seem to run anything you throw at them with ease? Is this true? In a perfect world id like to be running at 768x576 recording at 25fps which the current system just cant handle with 3 camera's. Each process (zms/zmc/zma) seems to use about 160mb of ram when active at this resolution, so im guessing more at higher resolutions. Am I realistically looking at needing 2gig of ram to make this a stable system or am I currently leaking memory somewhere? Any advise would be appreciated.

Hi,

you could also look at AMD Opteron running 64bit under Gentoo Linux (http://www.gentoo.org).

I am building a system soon for our new house and may build a low end ShuttleX machine with a single Opteron 246, 1GB RAM and a 120GB SATA drive.

Personally I think something of this spec would easily cope with a video stream and any necessary decoding.

I dont believe 1gig of ram would be enough for me, from what im seeing at present. Experimenting a little, if I run one camera at 640x480 memory use by the zmc is 70%, and cpu use is 10%. zma, depending on analysis settings uses 70% ram, and between 10% and 70% cpu. Writing to disk on alerts etc dont seem to have a very large impact on the system. The zms streaming server also uses a fair chunk of ram when run. Moving this out to 3 camera's, with 2 remote computers running a montage view 24x7, I cant help but this 2gig would be the minimum?

In terms of processors how would an opteron face up to say a single 3.,06ghz xeon?

I've got 2 analogue cameras at 768x576 and a network camera at 640x480 running ok on a AthlonXP 2000+ with 512MB Ram with 0% swap.

However, it blew up spectacularly the first time I started capturing with the default settings. My tip is to reduce the Image buffer (frames) setting. Don't make it any lower than Pre Event Image Buffer / Warm up frames or else you will get something like this in your syslog: