How many cameras can this run?

weberbn

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Building a DVR for a security camera system at work. I am not concerned with power usage. Due to how we are billed and what else is running in the building this does not matter. This would use fraction of what our VMware cluster, SAN's etc use.

What I am concerned with is maintaining a minimum of 15FPS (Ideally some where in the 20's) while recording 20-30 cameras at 1080p resolution. I will be running a dedicated 1gb POE/POE+ network (all over cat6e) to power the cameras and isolate them from the main corporate network by using multiple NIC's in the Blue Iris PC.

  • Intel Core i7-7740x (Yes, I know I don't need the unlocked verison. But I have the chip from something else)
  • 32gb DDR4
  • Samsung 960 EVO M.2 250GB SSD (OS only)
  • 6x WD Red Pro 4tb NAS drives in RAID10 (unless someone has a better suggest for very long term, mass storage. I have spare raid controllers sitting here at work)
  • iStarUSA D-406-B6SA-Blue chassis w/ SATA/SAS backplane


Would windows server be best for this, or W10 Pro? I have licenses for various versions of both, just looking for ideal environment for this.

Are there any issues given this hardware, network and software that I should be aware of?
 

weberbn

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Just realized the stupid i7-7740x doesn't have QuickSync. Thanks Intel for that! Swap in a i7-7700K instead. I'll have to actually purchase it, but performance is all I'm really looking for due to the number of cameras and potential for needing more.
 

weberbn

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Yeah, none of that is really helpful. I know what hardware to pick, I'm trying to get a gauge as to how many cameras it will really run. Which that horrifically spares on details guide does not do.
 

bp2008

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There are too many variables to confidently predict how many cameras you can run in Blue Iris on a particular computer, even if you define the resolution and frame rate of each camera. For one thing, Windows built in processes are extremely unpredictable in their CPU usage. My own home system normally idles at 50-55% with the Blue Iris GUI open. But yesterday it maxed itself out at 100%, slowed to a crawl, and caused BI to drop most of the cameras due to an unfortunate alignment of the planets. That is to say too much other junk consumed resources at the same time. Windows updates, file backup software, etc. There are other considerations, too, like the motion detection algorithms used, speed of the RAM, resolution of the display (if one is used), bit rates of the video streams, whether or not you have remote viewers active, when and how you play back your recordings. The best we can do is look at what other people have run successfully and make generalizations from there.

Anyway, if we define each camera to be 2 MP at 15 FPS, then 30 of those is 900 megapixels per second, which is nearly 50% more than I've successfully run before. My i7-3770K system is passably stable with 625 MP/s. This year I tried to remotely assist someone with an i7-6700 which against all expectations was performing much worse than my years-older system. I'm guessing it may have been running single channel memory or something, and didn't have the memory bandwidth to cope with the load.

So 30x 2MP cameras at 15 FPS just MIGHT work on an i7-7700K, or it might not and you might have to cut frame rates back or split it between two systems. Certainly, two i7 systems would handle it with room to spare. You could probably get away with 20-25 FPS on each of 30x 2MP cameras if you split it onto two systems and optimized it right.
 
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bp2008

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Lastly, there are other more scalable surveillance software packages out there, which are architected differently and do not need to constantly decode all incoming video streams. I've heard great things about ExacqVision. Of course you are going to pay an arm and a leg for that.
 

weberbn

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Cool, thats a pretty reasonable assessment of this. It definitely gives me ideas on what to do to make this proposed system work.

I do wonder how this stuff would run on a xeon system with many cores. Not that I have hardware here to try it on, but high core count xeon's with properly setup RAM (high bandwidth and tons of RAM) might make it scale out too. Thats how I run my plex server which does tons of encoding on the fly with super large file sizes. However, that is not really on the table for this project.
 

bp2008

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I wonder too. Alas, not many people can afford the equipment or the time to properly study that :)
 

aristobrat

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The best we can do is look at what other people have run successfully and make generalizations from there.
IMO, it would be great if there was a way to capture that (from the various threads) in a single location, like a shared Google doc or something. Maybe with a link back to the thread where the person discusses the details.
 
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