CPU Maxed out! Server Upgrade Suggestions?

I am currently running the full version of Netcam Studio. I have 5 Reolink RLC-410-5MP , 2 Panasonic BL-121, 4 Foscam FI18910W PTZ, 1 EasyN FS-613 PTZ and a Hikvision DS-2CD2432F-1. 13 cameras total.

My “server” is a HP Pavilion Slimline 400 with a AMD Quad Core A4-5000, 6GB DDR3 memory, 1TB drive and AMD Radeon HD8330 Graphics card.

The problem:
The only way I can get the CPU under 100% is to set the stream on the Reolink cameras to substream at 640X480. even with this setting, my CPU is at 80+%.

My Question:
I would like to be able to monitor and motion detect record on all cameras with the Reolink cameras at full resolution at around 20+ fps. What would be the best option when looking for a new “server” that could handle this kind of load? I would like to have the ability to add additional cameras of equal quality in the future as well.

Thank you in advance

Hi John,
That´s certainly an interesting a challenging setup that you have and I fully understand why the poor AMD processor is completely choked :slight_smile: I hope it survived. The 5MP cameras really use it all.

Normally I would give you some hints to tweak the system to lower the cpu usage, but when I look at the results and your demands I realize that it will most likely not work anyway. However, each setup is unique so have you tested to use software_vlc or hardware_DXVA2 or QuickSync? Any changes using that if the GPU and AMD processor supports that.

So here are some tips from experience.
CPU: for these applications the Intel i-series works best. A high-end i7 takes you a long way, but again from you demands I would go for the i9-series. The more cores/threads the better. I am planning to build my own computer dedicated for many MP cameras and I will use the i9-9900K, but I have not built that computer yet.
Maybe you can start with only one 5MP camera and see what happens and then use 2, 3 … to gain some experience.
Drive: I assume the 1TB is a standard 5400 rpm HDD. When everything is maximized today how busy is the HD? If motion is detected for many cams at the same time and with that resolution it will be a lot of writing to the disk. I have so far not experienced any limitation with HD´s running at 5400 rpm. A 1TB SSD is always fun, but a little bit more expensive.
Graphics card: not that crucial I would say since the mode hardware_dxva2 do not improve the situation that much.

Another way to test this is if you have access to servers with XEON processors. The more cores/threads the better. However, this is unfortunately not fully true since the xeon processor lack the graphics part which seems to be important. I have one system running on an HP server with a xeon 3.2GHz 4 core processor with 20 cams from 640x480 to 720p. That ends up at 95% all the time. For that application it is ok, but the videos are rather low fps and sometimes jumpy. A very important part of using xeon servers is the reliability and stability you get. My system have been running for 5 years with no unplanned downtime. For me that is very important.

A final possibility that might be interesting is to look at a dedicated DVR. My experience is however that these solution also gets rather expensive for high-end systems. Also it is not always possible to connect the cameras that you already have.

That is what I have and there are some other postings about this in the forum, but I think I have covered most of it above.

Good luck and please give us a report how it goes.
-Henrik

Thank you for the reply. I will be looking into the i9 moving forward.

So I am clear, you do not believe an i7 will deliver what I am looking for? There is a healthy price difference from my quick searches…

Honestly, I don´t know. The use of 5MP cameras is increasing, but with little experience with NCS. What you have now plus you want to add more 5MP cameras … Search in this forum for Intel i7 or core i7 and you will find several discussions. I don´t know if they have any new i7 with more cores today.

My cpu usage dropped 50% when I started netcam to run as a service. No more sudden stops either. But I have only 1x5MP, 1x3MP, 1x2.1MP and one 720 camera. Idle is 26%, with recording it climbs to 62% I7-4700HQM

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Thanks a lot for info!
If you change to hardware_dxva2 or hardware_quicksync does it lower the cpu load?
-Henrik

In the spirit of providing information…
I have 9 cameras ranging from 640x480 to 3mp running on a Quad-Core i7-4710HQ in an ASUS GL551JM-DH71 I bought back in 2014. I had to reduce quality quite a bit.
The service constantly crashes. So I had to enable a timer job to make sure it’s running every five minutes. It normally runs at about 90-100% CPU utilization.

I still want to add more cameras. So I’m going to be dusting off my old gamer desktop and do a full rebuild.

Does anyone have experience with the Ryzen CPUs? They seem to be high core/thread count CPUs without the price gouge of an Intel I-9 cpu.

Hi,
To find out why the service crashes go to Windows Event Viewer where you have info about the crash and maybe that can give you more info about what might be wrong.
I have actually a very similar situation with the setup and I am running an HP server with a Xeon e3-1220v3 also resulting in around 95% load. Even the high load it never crashes, but some extra free procent would be good.
What processor to upgrade to? This type of software do a lot of calculations and therefore many cores are good. I am not familiar with Ryzen processors, but they are not that common in these systems. Ryzen often do a good job with computer games, but that´s not what´s going on here.
An easy way to compare processors, if they are in the same processor generation, is to just multiply the number or core with the clock frequency, 4 x 3,5 = 14.
Another way that I found OK is to use Passmark for the CPU for comparison between different processor generations.
Or, why not buy a second hand server with a Xeon processor? That´s what I am using now. You get a lot of computer and cpu-power for the money.
-Henrik