Mac Studio configuration for SecuritySpy
I am planning to take Ben's advice for camera selection to optimize AI detection: 8MP with P-iris and autofocus. I anticipate a system of eight such cameras.
I will be purchasing a Mac Studio to act as the SecuritySpy server and also provide my other computing needs. With eight 8MP cameras, should a base Mac Studio configuration be more than sufficient to avoid SecuritySpy tying up substantial computing or memory resources? Or should I consider upgrading the CPU, GPU, and/or Neural Engine? Base model:
M2 Max, 12-Core CPU
30-Core GPU
16-Core Neural Engine
32GB unified memory
My current Intel iMac (Retina 5K, 4.2 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7, Radeon Pro 580 8 GB, 24 GB main memory) serving only four 3MP cameras does bog down pretty badly, with very substantial CPU usage by SecuritySpy, which is why I ask.
Thanks, Bill
Comments
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Hi Bill,
A base-model Mac Studio will be able to easily cope with 8x 8 MP cameras with very low resource usage. There will be no need to upgrade beyond the base model, unless you need more power for the other tasks you are planning to use this machine for.
It is surprising that you are seeing high CPU usage on your current iMac, since it should easily be able to cope with 4x 3 MP cameras. If you want us to take a look at this and suggest ways to reduce the resource usage, please email us and include a debug file (SecuritySpy menu > Debug > Create Debug File On Desktop).
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I used to use a similar iMac (2017 i7 580 64gb) and to run 4 x 5MP cameras, 3 x 2MP and 1 x 8MP at around 20% cpu usage. The iMac has hardware decoding for h264 and h265 so it should be able to easily handle 3 x 8MP cams.
Do you have it setup to re-encode all those feeds for some reason? I have motion detection on 5/8 cams and at least one remote client viewing 4 feeds 24/7.
I ended up using my 2012 i7 dual core iMac instead because it is easily capable of running all of the above at about 30% cpu even though it doesnt have hardware decode for h265 (only one of my cams has h265 but not h264).
The point is that maybe some configuration changes would reduce your load and you could save a few grand and get a mac mini instead of a mac studio.
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Interesting. My iMac consistently shows SecuritySpy CPU usage of 25-30% even with no video monitoring going on. No re-encoding is enabled. I will take Ben up on his offer to have his support try to figure out why.
I have to upgrade the Mac anyway, though a suitably configured M2 Mac Mini would probably be fine, too. When you configure up the Mini the price difference may not be that big, and the Studio does have more ports. Thanks.
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Update on the high SecuritySpy CPU usage on my Intel iMac.
In troubleshooting this with Ben I realized that I had been relying on iStat Menus to report per-app CPU usage, but iStat consistently reports far higher Security Spy usage than Apple's Activity Monitor. Judging from Tim Cook's numbers SecuritySpy is behaving itself very nicely even on this older Intel Mac. So this was, embarrassingly, a false alarm.
I've submitted a support request with the iStat Menus developer asking for an explanation and will report back here if I get a response.
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Further update. It turns out that iStat Menus has a preference setting for displaying CPU usage Unix style (0-800%), which for some reason was set on this Intel iMac. When I change that to the more familiar 0-100% iStat reports SecuritySpy using far less CPU than Activity Monitor. Go figure. Bottom line is older Intel Macs, based on my experience, can run SecuritySpy just fine.
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Hi @nagar thanks for posting this update. It's curious why the numbers from iStat Menu diverge so much from Activity Monitor, but I would tend to trust Activity Monitor's numbers since this is Apple's own software. Good to hear that SecuritySpy is actually running with low resource usage on your machine.
