Recommendation for Equipment for 24 Simultaneous Cameras with Recording.

E

Exoddus

n3wb
Nov 20, 2023
5
0
Spain
Hello everyone, I currently have 24 simultaneous cameras recording on a Ryzen 7 but I want to add more cameras. I would like to buy a tower exclusively for this purpose.
I am hesitating between an Intel Core i9-13900KF 3Ghz and an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X.
Which processor do you think is better?
32 or 64GB of RAM? Is any RAM configuration better?
I have read that you can offload work from the CPU to the GPU, so what graphics card can I buy that is compatible with Blue Iris?
I hope you can help me, as I want to install about 30 more cameras and need advice.
Thank you!
 
BI does not use GPU power at all. If you want to use self-hosted AI, then you can use a GPU to off-load some of the processing power in that situation. Perhaps this is where you are getting confused.

I'm running 12 cameras on a old i7-7700 with 16 GB of ram it the system runs at about 10-12% CPU and 50% RAM usage. What is your typical CPU/RAM usage right now with 24 cameras? I really don't think you need as powerful a computer as you are considering for BI use, but you might want to go with 64GB RAM. However if you plan on self-hosting AI, then perhaps that extra power would be useful. Where you should spend your money is on good quality server/NVR grade hard drives. You definitely want something that is designed for constant writes/reads which the average consumer grade drive is not designed to do. 30 cameras constantly recording is going to use up a lot of HD space. Therefore you are going to need large capacity drives and probably more than one. This could be one of your biggest expenses.
 
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Hardware acceleration (GPU) isn't needed anymore. That was only needed back before substreams were introduced. The substreams allowed other CPUs without QuickSync to be used. For kicks I disabled it and deleted the driver and my system ran fine LOL.

Around the time AI was introduced in BI, many here had their system become unstable with hardware acceleration on (even if not using DeepStack or CodeProject). Some have also been fine. I started to see that error when I was using hardware acceleration several updates into when AI was added.

This hits everyone at a different point. Some had their system go wonky immediately, some it was after a specific update, and some still don't have a problem, but the trend is showing running hardware acceleration will result in a problem at some point.

However, with substreams being introduced, the CPU% needed to offload video to a GPU (internal or external) is more than the CPU% savings seen by offloading to a GPU. Especially after about 12 cameras, the CPU goes up by using hardware acceleration.

My CPU % went down by not using hardware acceleration. Here is a recent thread where someone turned off hardware acceleration based on my post and their CPU dropped 10-15% and BI became stable. A GPU is only needed if you plan to do a lot of CodeProject, which would be insane as most find the AI in the cameras to be more than enough.

But if you use HA, use plain intel and not the variants.

The computer you are looking at is way overkill. Buy a used i5-8500 and you will be far ahead.

In fact a 4th generation is still very capable. Not that I am saying you should buy that LOL, but it shows that a 13th gen is overkill.

My humble i5-4590 still humming along with 30+ cams:

I see people posting about their i7-xxxx system bogging down with less than 10 cameras so I wanted to update my setup. I have ~33 cams running on my BI system: HP Elitedesk 800 G1 tower i5-4590 @ 3.3GHz 16GB ram 12TB total purple drives for storage 30+ total cams currently - 22 cams visible in...
ipcamtalk.com ipcamtalk.com
 
Where can I disable hardware acceleration? Because my CPU always goes to 100% if I have 24 cameras and record with more than 16. I have them set at 15FPS.?
I have to buy equipment anyway and maybe next year I will have many more cameras and I would also like to be able to record, isn't a better processor better? apart from optimizing it?
 
Have you done every optimization in the wiki? Substreams are a must.

More spec about your current Ryzen 7 - there are lots of flavors (3xxx or 5xxxx as an example) - is it a mini or a tower, what kind of drives do you have, etc.

Optimizing Blue Iris's CPU Usage

Blue Iris uses a lot of CPU time. In most Blue Iris installations, your CPU is the limiting factor which determines how many cameras you can have. As such, it is extremely important to optimize your configuration to ensure you can get the most out of your system while consuming the least...
ipcamtalk.com ipcamtalk.com
 
Exoddus said:
Where can I disable hardware acceleration? Because my CPU always goes to 100% if I have 24 cameras and record with more than 16. I have them set at 15FPS.?
I have to buy equipment anyway and maybe next year I will have many more cameras and I would also like to be able to record, isn't a better processor better? apart from optimizing it?
Click to expand...

Make sure you are recording directly to disk, and use substreams. These two choices are critical to getting the CPU usage down to as little as possible.
 
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wittaj said:
Have you done every optimization in the wiki? Substreams are a must.

More spec about your current Ryzen 7 - there are lots of flavors (3xxx or 5xxxx as an example) - is it a mini or a tower, what kind of drives do you have, etc.

Optimizing Blue Iris's CPU Usage

Blue Iris uses a lot of CPU time. In most Blue Iris installations, your CPU is the limiting factor which determines how many cameras you can have. As such, it is extremely important to optimize your configuration to ensure you can get the most out of your system while consuming the least...
ipcamtalk.com ipcamtalk.com
Click to expand...

AMD Ryzen 7 3700X 8-Core Processor 3.59 GHz
32GB RAM
If I don't record with 24 cameras, everything goes perfectly, the CPU usage is only 4%. The moment I start recording, it goes up to 100% if I want to record with all 24.
 
What device are you trying to record to? An external drive on a USB or if an internal drive, what manufacturer?
 
Exoddus said:
Can you check if I have that option in the options I sent earlier?
Click to expand...

You are not recording direct to disk. This means that BI has to process/reencode every video feed that is being recorded instead of simply recording the data being streamed by the camera. This is certainly the root of your "recording" issue. Change that to Directo-a-disco and I think you will find a huge drop in the CPU usage being seen while recording.

BI Direct to Disk.png
 
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And 15 fps is more than needed for recording, use 10 fps its enough.
Also check the display live update fps... settings,cameras, "limit live preview fps" to 10 .. that make a lot of difference in cpu load.

Brgds TheSwede
 
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So, lets say that you (me) wanted to use a second computer to run the latest BI with CPAI. It would be running four to six 4k cams, two PTZs, and three to four z12's for LPR duty. What would be the specific breakdown, and I mean list so I can buy all the parts, lol. I know @MikeLud1 has a rtx 4090 gpu, but what are low range GPUs that you can use? Can you use the Intel Arc A750? Is having a processor that doesn't have a built in gpu, like intel F processor ok if you have a dedicated gpu?
 
@wittaj I don't want to hijack the thread, so just for clarification, your recommendation to turn off HA is applicable to Blue Iris 5 only, correct? Because it utilizes dual streams.

What is your recommendation for Blue Iris 4 users?
 
msquared said:
@wittaj I don't want to hijack the thread, so just for clarification, your recommendation to turn off HA is applicable to Blue Iris 5 only, correct? Because it utilizes dual streams.

What is your recommendation for Blue Iris 4 users?
Click to expand...

Yeah since substreams wasn't available until much later into the V5 release, anyone on a version of BI that does not have substreams should utilize HA. HA certainly makes a difference when only running mainstream.
 
Any mainstreams I pull are 2MP, any substream I pull (if the camera has the option) is 2MP or less. 12 cameras run 33% CPU of Intel Core i5 9600K. I just haven't gotten around to moving to BI5 yet.
 
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