New Blue Iris Setup - Plenty of compute power, but poor performance.

[eptesicus]

OK you got it working.

Let it run for a few days and verify that you are getting the desired results for motion detection, alerts and video play back.

Also I would re think the use of a Raid on a video system. It is much better to have multiple disks with the cameras spread out on different disks. So a single drive failure does not affect all your camera recording.
There are much better setups for video recording and redundancy.

Thanks. Respectfully, if anything, I'd move to RAID 10. The performance of this would be much better than R5 or single disks, and I could lose 2 disks (not of the same stripe, obviously). I'd also see about getting my parents an external HDD and see about backing up specific recordings to it automatically in the event of a catastrophic failure of the array. But, since we both have pretty good internet, I could schedule backups nightly to run to my homelab where I have about 254TB of storage.

I do agree with you that an i7 would be ideal... I do have an i7-3700k cpu/mobo/ram combo that I could swap and put in the system for them... Would that yield greater performance than the dual Xeons?

Running in demo mode will cause these issues

I double-checked that the license was installed, and it is.

 

[SouthernYankee]

Disk speed is not important for camera recording. Just record a few cameras to each drive. This allows for a single drive to fail with out lost of all camera data.

For backup I also record all 12 of my cameras as clones to a single 4tb purple drive on a NAS. No perforemance problems.

 

[Whoaru99]

Thanks. Respectfully, if anything, I'd move to RAID 10. The performance of this would be much better than R5 or single disks, and I could lose 2 disks (not of the same stripe, obviously). I'd also see about getting my parents an external HDD and see about backing up specific recordings to it automatically in the event of a catastrophic failure of the array. But, since we both have pretty good internet, I could schedule backups nightly to run to my homelab where I have about 254TB of storage.

I do agree with you that an i7 would be ideal... I do have an i7-3700k cpu/mobo/ram combo that I could swap and put in the system for them... Would that yield greater performance than the dual Xeons?



I double-checked that the license was installed, and it is.

I asked about RAID early on and in so many words was told it is a waste for this.

bp2008 put it out there in a pretty convincing way, I thought...

"Almost everything you ever write to a surveillance drive is worthless, and the probability of disk failure is low. So, chances are even if you experience a disk failure, you will not lose any valuable video."

The system itself does not need the performance nor the redundancy of RAID. A Google data center ain't necessary.

 

[eptesicus]

I asked about RAID early on and in so many words was told it is a waste for this.

bp2008 put it out there in a pretty convincing way, I thought...

"Almost everything you ever write to a surveillance drive is worthless, and the probability of disk failure is low. So, chances are even if you experience a disk failure, you will not lose any valuable video."

The system itself does not need the performance nor the redundancy of RAID. A Google data center ain't necessary.

I appreciate it, but I don't store data without the appropriate RAID. I get that it works for some, but just because I want to use RAID doesn't mean it's a data center or overkill. RAID doesn't equal enterprise.

RAID 5 means there's 1 failure and data is still intact. That means data can be stored on one single volume and doesn't have to be spread across multiples.

I have many RAID arrays at home... 2x R10 arrays with 12x 600GB SAS drives each in my SAN for VM storage, 2x NAS' with 24x 4TB HDDs each in R6 for media storage, and an R6 array with 16x 3TB for Veeam backups. And with all that, RAID is not the element that is overkill. It's appropriate.

Also, if you think the data isn't critical if you lose a drive, then what the hell is the point of having these camera systems? If it's data you may need to reference, then it's its important enough to ensure you're good if at least one drive dies.

 

[Whoaru99]

I don't believe you appreciate it at all. in fact, I bet just the opposite.

 

[aristobrat]

I do agree with you that an i7 would be ideal... I do have an i7-3700k cpu/mobo/ram combo that I could swap and put in the system for them... Would that yield greater performance than the dual Xeons?

There's a 3rd-party Blue Iris Helper tool that does a bunch of cool stuff, including sharing anonymous performance stats on the site below. You can search by processor and see what results folks are getting... at least for the i7. Only looks like two people are running the Xeon you're running...
Blue Iris Update Helper

 

[Whoaru99]

, then it's its important enough to ensure you're good if at least one drive dies.

The reason was given earlier but hey, I waste a bunch of money on unnecessary stuff too. Just different stuff. LOL.

 

[aristobrat]

but just because I want to use RAID doesn't mean it's a data center or overkill

Just teasing here, but mentioning that you have 52 88 HDDs at home kind of makes this point (^^^^) seem questionable.

I have many RAID arrays at home...
2x R10 arrays with 12x 600GB SAS drives each in my SAN for VM storage,
2x NAS' with 24x 4TB HDDs each in R6 for media storage, and an
R6 array with 16x 3TB for Veeam backups.

 

[pozzello]

i count 88+ drives. overkill? depends on who you ask, i guess...

 

[bp2008]

I've got no experience with dual socket servers myself, but as I understand it not all software can properly utilize multiple CPUs. Maybe that is the case with BI. It could certainly explain why it was choking with just over 50% CPU load.

Xeon E5-2620, despite being a 6 core CPU with hyperthreading, just isn't very fast by modern standards. According to benchmarks it is roughly equivalent to a 4th-7th generation i5 (4 core, no hyperthreading), and you'd probably be exceeding the limits of one of those with 13x 2MP @30FPS, and that is with the advantage of hardware accelerated decoding which the Xeon does not have.

If you are down to 5% CPU load that means you probably enabled BI's "Limit decoding" feature on most or all of the cameras.

 

[timgiwo]

I have a Dell R710 and was having extremely frustrating performance issues with Blue Iris in my Windows 10 VM on Proxmox. These manifested themselves in the form of audio cutting in and out during playback. Laggy and choppy video performance. Looking at the buffers in UI3, FPS would peak at 20, then drop to 3 then peak back up to 20 again repetitively; on the "stats for nerds" this looked like a sawtooth graph.

I came upon another post where another user had changed their BIOS power saving/performance settings of their Dell Server to "Max Performance". Sure enough there is a performance BIOS setting on these servers! Making this change to "Max Performance" alleviated just about all of my unexplainable issues! A nice by-product was much better performance and more consistent CPU utilization of my virtualization host overall