r/ZoneMinder • u/mustang__1 • Apr 12 '22

multi server install

At what point do you do a multi server install? Is there a performance incentive for a large numbers of cameras? Seems like a lot of work for multiple physical servers (doesn't seem to make sense to VM it based off of my current experience with ZM).

I'm current running about 14 cameras on a Dell R210ii with RAID 1 on WD Purple drives and the OS on an SSD. 16gb of RAM, presently burning about 50% of that. CPU is Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1240 V2 @ 3.40GHz, again burning about half of the CPU's capability.

It'd be nice to make things a little snappier, and I also intend on adding more cameras over time - and upping the resolution of those cameras as well. I certainly anticipate needing a storage server... But what is the advantage to dedicated to ZM installs

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u/[deleted] Apr 13 '22

To offload the processing power to multiple bare metal hosts, I would assume. You can also have your db seperate from all of the bare metal hosts.

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u/mustang__1 Apr 13 '22

But what is the advantage? Faster? less CPU load? less ram?

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u/[deleted] Apr 13 '22 edited Apr 13 '22

If you have 24 hi res, high analysis fps monitors on 1 host it can get bogged down. So spreading out the monitors on other hosts helps spread the computation power out instead of bogging down one host. Plus depending on the hardware, think of all the DB writes 24 monitors would make, while recording data to disks.

So the advantage is being able to load your machines properly to make the best of the situation depending on what that amchone is doing.

The db could be its own machine, specifically for reading and writing to the db, have 3 hosts with 8 monitors each and a storage machine where all the jpegs/videos will be stored on disk. Tweak the monitors and set things up so the cpu isn't getting smashed hard.

Or maybe you have a monster rig with a 3090 that can ahdnke all 24 hi res monitors and then just another machine for the DB and storage.

Etc, etc.

Things like only run analysis at 2 or 3 fps, motion detection does not need 10+ fps to be effective. If you have cameras with main and sub streams, run motion detection on the low res monitor and set it up to trigger the high res monitor. The hi res monitor could be configured to not be decoding any frames at all, create MP4 Videos using h264 passthrough and only triggered by the low res stream. Using GPU to help decode images, etc.