Forums/Version 2/General Discussion

Hardware requirments?

Adam Hill
posted this on December 05, 2011 07:57

Hi There

I was looking for some more specifics on Hardware requirements for your cards. I have previously setup systems with IP cameras and had performance issues. I was finding the systems would start having issues at around 16 cameras @640x480x7fps. This is on a very powerful quad core machines. It's odd, individually every peice of hardware seemed to be running well within it's limits but the system as a whole struggled.

 

Anyway I'm looking at setting up a new system  and scaling it to perhaps 200 cameras upto704x480 atleast 7fps. I'd like todo this with as few servers as possible and without any performance issues.

What sort of hardware am I going to need(for maximum performance) and can you suggest some system configurations that you know work well?

 

Thanks Adam

 

 

ps

I would very much like to use Linux
 

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Curtis Hall
Bluecherry

Adam,

Are you planning on using IP or analog cameras?  

We haven't had anyone stress test version 2 with this many cameras (that we know about).  My guess is that you would need 5-6 decent servers to handle this load.  IP motion detection will be the biggest factor.

Thanks

December 05, 2011 18:02.
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Adam Hill
No I was going to go with analog cameras and use your 16/32 input cards. Obviously you've got hardware compression cards. Would a system using hardware compression only be limited to PCI slots? I was wondering if it would be more cost effective to go the software compression route and have several servers. However looking at the prices of the cards vs prices of beefy servers, 16port hardware compression card x13 =$3900, vs a load of servers. Looks like that might be the more cost effective.
December 06, 2011 02:28.
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Curtis Hall
Bluecherry

Our latest cards (H.264) use PCIe.  The MPEG-4 cards used PCI.  

You can stack multiple cards in one computer, but I wouldn't go much more then 4 16 port cards in one computer.  4 x 16 ports cards would run around 30-35% CPU on a dual core computer with 4GB of ram.

December 06, 2011 15:20.
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Adam Hill
Not 8x on a quad/hex core with 12+gb ram?
December 07, 2011 02:10.
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Curtis Hall
Bluecherry

After a while you will run into disk I/O problems.  

You also have to keep in mind that running 64+ cameras on one machine is a bad idea.  If the computer crashes, a power supply blows up, or a hard drive dies you have now lost 64 cameras.  It's much better to spend a bit more and spread the load over several servers then one big server that when it blows up, you lose everything.

December 07, 2011 07:14.
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Adam Hill
hmmm good points. Ok so coming at this from a completely different angle. How about several lower power servers with just one 16port card each. What would be the lowest spec needed for good performance, sold frame rates no jerking or lagging even when all 16 cameras are fully active.
December 08, 2011 03:01.
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