ZoneMinder Forums

Hi All

I have searched the forums, and have not really been able to get specific information regarding the recommended specifications for the PC / Server needed to record.

I understand, and have seen in some of the replies that it is not an exact science, and that there are various factors that could contribute to high CPU usage.

The question is thus, has anyone got any guidelines for say 5 cameras being recorded using lets say rather standard configuration; i.e. 5 Axis 206 cameras, recording at say 15 fps.

Any ideas or guidelines?

Thanks

its the fps that will kill you that 75 fps
if you know that 640 x 480 is 4 time the info of 320x240 and most guidance i have seen assumes this res then you are talking about 300 fps in old money. also image size at 640 x 480 is approx 80k?
thats 6 megabytes a second your gonna be sending to disk. I would say taht most machine would handle 5 206's at 640x480 but upto around 5 fps

If i was building a zm to handle that id be torn between an 4800 X2 or one of them new dualcore ee pentiums YOu could try a 3.2Gig P4 or drop your fps or res or both

data point:

I've got:
4 X Axis 201 on record (96 hour loop) at 640x480 frameskip=10
2 X Axis 206 on modect at 640x480 frameskip=0
1 x Phillips USB cam on modect 320x240 frameskip=0

running on:
Dell PowerEdge SC1425
Dual Xeon 2.8GHz
3GB RAM
Dual 80GB SATA in software RAID-0
Gentoo Linux

The 4 201s are usually being watched in a montage window at high bandwidth.
Then they're all running the machine is pretty sluggish, one 206 is offline now and the load average is about 8.

-db

Recent CPU tests have shown the AMD Athlon XP dual cores are smoking the Pentium Dual Cores.

http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-10442_7-6389077.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20051121/index.html

-Casey

note i am starting to be converted to amd for these things. The only thing that would make me stay intel is mmx sse etc and the jpeg compression. Im assuming that once we get it working its gonna be easier to stick with i processor (to start with amyway)

James