SS Overload...
I'm looking for recommendations on a different hardware setup. I purchased a MacMini 2.6Ghz i5 8GB/1T but will be saving files to an external 3T RAID. I've got 18) Dahua IPC-HFW4300S 3MP HD Network Security Cameras strapped to the Mini through a Cisco managed POE switch. I understand that this is WAY overloaded but I've tried to "dumb-down" the cameras to see if I can get the whole thing to work properly. I guess my question would be, will this setup work at some (any) level? Right now I've got the camera resolutions set to 1080p and all of them to 3fps. It'll run all day long in Passive Mode, but when it tries to switch to "Active" mode, it instantly crashes Security Spy. Next question would be on the System Requirements Calculator... Do these numbers apply to older MacPros or are the recommendations predicated on the current crop of MacPros introduced in 2013?
Comments
Your Mac mini is indeed rather overloaded with so many high-resolution cameras. But by lowering the frame rates and/or resolutions you should be able to get it working well, and it can still be a highly effective video surveillance system. I would personally prefer keeping the full resolutions but lowering frame rates until the CPU usage is under control.
I would recommend following the advice in the Optimising Performance section of the user manual. Specifically you want SecuritySpy to be saving the H.264 video from the cameras directly to disk without any additional encoding. You achieve this via the "No recompression" option in the Video Device Settings window, and making sure that SecuritySpy's text overlay, video blanking, and transformation features are not being used.
The crashes may be due to the Mac being overloaded, and the above settings changes may resolve this, but I'd like to have a look at this to check. Please can you locate the crash log files and email these to us. In the Finder, hold the alt (option) key and click the Go menu, select Library, and within this Library folder, navigate to Logs and then DiagnosticReports. The crash log files are here - just send a few of the recent ones.
"Broken Pipe" is a network problem, causing a disconnect of the connection. If it happened on all cameras at once, this could be your ethernet switch restarting, or some other network-related issue. When this happens SecuritySpy will reconnect to the cameras automatically, so as long as it's not happening too often, it isn't a big problem.
The "excessive packet loss" message happens when some packets in the RTP stream are not received by SecuritySpy for whatever reason. Again, if this isn't happening often then you don't have to worry; it will simply result in a few frames of bad video.
Glad to hear everything is basically working well at 3fps.
Some of the descriptions you gave are network-related, as you mention. What is the throughput on the connection between the Mac and the switch? Errors? You can measure this with the built-in Activity Monitor.app in MacOS but it's not very granular and has only a tiny slice of history.
If you have a spare Linux box somewhere, or even if you're just running another Mac with VMWare Fusion, I'd say fire up a copy of Observium or LibreNMS (a fork of Observium.) This is an SNMP-based tool that is super-easy to get going and will monitor all of the data on your Cisco switch, and also on your cameras and Mac if you turn SNMP on in those elements as well. There are VM images available for both ready-to-go. This will let you graph all of the stuff going on in the network, which is really a requirement for figuring out what devices are doing what, and with what errors (if any.)
Great to hear things are working well with your new Mac Pro.
I can see why the Activity Monitor percentages can be a bit confusing. Basically, in the list of processes it is showing a percentage equivalent to "how much of one CPU core is being used", and hence if you have an 8-core Mac, 238% usage equates to roughly 30% usage of the total Mac's processing power. In this case, if one process were using all of the Mac's 8 cores fully, it would be shown as having an 800% CPU usage.
The percentages at the bottom of the window, by contrast, are for the total processing power of all the CPU cores of the Mac, so it makes sense that the figure shown here is 30%.
In addition, the Xeon E5 processors in your Mac Pro (as well as the i7 processors in other Mac models) have a feature called "Hyper-Threading", where each physical core presents two "virtual cores" that, to some extent, can run two threads simultaneously. In this case, even though the machine might have 4 physical cores, all software that runs on the Mac (including SecuritySpy and Activity Monitor) will see 8 cores.
Hope this helps.
i am looking at an install using an axis p7216 with 16 cams.