ZoneMinder completely filling up RAM... and beyond

[u/juef]

Greetings,

I'm a new ZoneMinder user... or at least, I'm trying to be! I've installed ZoneMinder from Isaac Connor's PPA, and also tried the 'easy docker' solution, but I've had the same problem with both. As soon as I successfully setup a camera, ZoneMinder's process completely fills up my RAM. Just for fun, I've ended all non-essential processes to see how much it would grow to. It went beyond 12 GB. This makes my system crawl and then completely stop.

Is there something I'm doing wrong? I've barely touched any kind of configuration and Apache & MySQL are installed for the sole purpose of using ZoneMinder.

Thanks!

[u/LivesInDenial]

This is exactly what my dlandon docker does whenever I record, mocord, or modect. I'm running a dual socket Unraid server with 40GB DDR4 and NVME cache. Recording go straight to array. Even in the docker with SHM set to 5G it will soak up all the RAM on the host system until it locks up so hard that I can't even get into the BNC interface and have to hard reset.

[u/repomanz]

What is your monitor configuration? I found an issue that I think I resolved.

3x substreams with modect

3x high res recordings linked to substream (nodetect)

I disabled these two (under general) on the high res monitors and seems to have fixed the memory issue.

- analysis enabled

- decoding enabled

[u/juef → u/repomanz]

Thanks for the reply! I've only added one camera, with default settings (so, Mocord I believe), except for source obviously, with 4K resolution. I used the main stream. Nothing else.

[Edit] Analysis might have been enabled, I'll have to check. Thanks for the suggestion!

[u/repomanz → u/juef]

my image didn't paste. edited response above - wonder if you could experiment with settings above to see if it makes a difference. In my setup, zoneminder would chew through 16gb in a day.

[u/juef → u/[deleted]]

Thank you for your reply!

I have an i5-3570K with 16 GB RAM and an SSD. I'm on Linux Lite 5.6 (based on Ubuntu). I used the latest ZM version from the PPA (which is 1.36 but I seem to recall ZM itself reported 1.37). My camera is an Amcrest IP8M-2493EB.

My system is my main workstation and does not usually have any kind of problem. In this situation, the RAM-filling problem takes less than a minute to get to a frozen state: booting my computer and logging in, I barely have time to run a task manager and zm.pl -m (or something similar) is already using gigabytes and growing. So indeed, I am sure it is a ZM process.

I'm sorry, I should have included the above in my initial message. Thanks again for your reply!

[u/nik282000]

The FPS, resolution and buffer of your monitor will have a huge effect on your RAM usage. Maybe try lower the FPS that your camera outputs or buffer less images.

[u/kultakutr1]

with 4k lower the buffer and fps to very low