I had posted a thread about attempting to do an install using 24 8MP Cameras using
Blue Iris, and said I would come back with a follow up.
I used two 10 Core V3 Xeon Chips, 64GB of RAM, 4 - 4TB drives for storage, an SSD for the OS and Blue Iris. I also used 4 different network cards with 6 cameras per switch to try to balance the network load. My total server cost was near $6,000.
Blue Iris started to choke at around 8 cameras. The video went choppy, as well as the recordings. I wasn't coming close to maxing out the CPU, or RAM. This was attempted using Direct to Disk recording, setting the cameras at 7fps.
I ended up having to use Milestone Xprotect Essentials, but even then I ran into issues using their smart client. If you put more than 6 cameras at their full resolution using smart client they would lag, and be choppy. Recordings were fine though. Overall it worked better than Blue Iris.
My resolution was to open the smart client software 4 times and use a program to split the screen into 4 sections. In the smart client you also need to have the resolution set at the max and the frames per second set at unlimited, having it attempt to lower the settings actually makes live viewing worse.
Xprotect Essentials I was able to use the 15fps on the 8MP cameras as well. It's a much more expensive program. I personally think Blue Iris is much more user friendly and provides better results, it's just not quite designed for that many 8MP cameras.
I believe Xprotect could handle even more cameras using this hardware, but Essentials maxes out at 26 cameras. My CPU usage seems to hover around 55% and am using approx 24GB of RAM. If someone is looking to have a similar setup they may be able to step down to 8 core processors instead of 10 and achieve usable results.
I don't think Blue Iris is quite ready for that many pixels being displayed at one time. I think if we could set the substream to be the main view, and when you clicked on the cameras it switched to the full resolution view it would save on the processing power and allow it to work.
I know this is a Blue Iris forum and not an Xprotect one, however my original intentions were to put this setup on Blue Iris and I don't think many of us get the opportunities to test such expensive hardware without a client paying for it. It would have helped me tremendously to know I needed much more expensive software prior to bidding out the job. Having to pay for Xprotect cut my profit to almost none, but it was a learning experience none the less.
