ZoneMinder Forums

Hello folks,

As some of you know, I'm looking at putting together a ZM server for a 6-camera system. I have a couple of PC's here (actually old servers) and in order to see if they are suitable, I was wondering if I could purchase a single Axis network camera (I think that's the route I'm going to go rather than CCTV) and hook it up as 10 monitors in ZM. First off, is that possible, and second, would it work to test the power of the server at all? If not, has anyone else got any ideas on how to stress-test a ZM server?

Server spec is a Dual-Processor Pentium 3, with 1Gb RAM and (currently) RAID-5 disks.

I really think it would be worth spending the £300-£400 needed to build a no-frills PC-based machine from scratch, but we're on a bit of a budget, so if the server is fine we'd rather use that. (It makes a LOT of noise though...)

Dammit, I'm talking myself out of it already

I think you stream multiple feeds from Axis cams without too much trouble, provided your cam is configured to allow it. You could also set up some loopback monitors where monitor B uses the zms feed from monitor A as an input. I'm not sure how realisitc it would be though unless you plan to have zms processes running all the time in your system.

Not sure, I think it would be useful to be able to say that under the maximum likely load (modect on all cams with a continuous event?) a particular machine will host X number of cams before limping away to hide behind the sofa.

For the sake of planning, the actual load is somewhat irrelevent, it's the maximum possible load that would usually be thought about.

Which reminds me, they're still running on an antiquated 10Mbps hub, best get that replaced with a gigswitch before ZM goes in

I wish I had a lab here to try all this kind of stuff out on. Unfortunately I don't, it looks more like the inside of a skip than a lab

The other problem is that a system set for modect when nothing is happening is going to be a lot less loaded than one when all cameras are firing on motion and several people are all logged in for a look. So you need to make sure you have a best/worst case scenario and also that you don't just open up the machine for the world and his dog to spend all day looking at multi-montage views.

another way is to use zm4ms and set it to 100 ms refresh rates. That will really nail your machine with loads of about 15 i would think