Hey all, hoping for some advice if any of you have experience with mid- to large-scale deployments with Sighthound. Most posts I see here concerned with specs are running with maybe a dozen cameras, tops. I'm looking to potentially be using the software to replace our aging analog DVR system, so in the ballpark of 40-50 cameras after all is said and done. Does anyone have experience with using Sighthound on this scale, and if so do you have any advice as far as baseline specs I should be looking for in a system?
I'm currently testing with a spare machine which has an i7 2720QM running Sighthound for six cameras each streaming 1440p@30fps (6144kbps) using H.264. The memory usage is effectively negligible, but the CPU is idling in the ballpark of 65-70 percent, which is a little concerning going on how many cameras I hope to eventually have set up. I'm not sure if resource usage will scale linearly for the software, but is there a general guideline as to how much compute power is required per stream? Does 40-50 cameras seem feasible for a single-socket system, or should I be looking for a dual-Xeon board or something even beefier?
Help with specs for a large-scale installation
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sv_alex - Posts: 42
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Re: Help with specs for a large-scale installation
Hi tgwp,
40-50 cameras is far from a trivial deployment, and there's much to be considered other than CPU. 2720QM is hardly a good benchmark (it barely pulls 6000 on Passmark - https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cp ... 40+2.20GHz), but even something as mainstream as i7 4770 would probably top out at 10-14 1440p cameras.
One of the largest systems ran by someone we know (so we know it runs well) is mentioned in this post: topic12977#p19125 ... should give you something to extrapolate from. We know of another system that at one point ran 25-30 cameras (most 1080p, some 1440p), and it is spec'ed as follows:
DELL PowerEdge R710
2x X5670
144GB ram
Samsung 850 SSD system drive
RAID 5 / drive pool archive drive
ESXI 6.5, Windows 10 VM, 24 vCPU, 32 GB RAM
The requirements will rise exponentially as the resolution grows, and will depend quite a bit on the amount of activity in the scenes as well.
To emphasize, CPU is just a part of the story here. Storage, and potentially, network equipment may prove to be just as critical to the success of such a deployment. Stability and quality of the cameras will also be important: can't imagine any system running 40-50 run of the mill "budget" cameras running trouble-free, no matter how beefy the server is.
Hopefully this provides useful in sizing your system. Let us know if we can help with any additional data point.
40-50 cameras is far from a trivial deployment, and there's much to be considered other than CPU. 2720QM is hardly a good benchmark (it barely pulls 6000 on Passmark - https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cp ... 40+2.20GHz), but even something as mainstream as i7 4770 would probably top out at 10-14 1440p cameras.
One of the largest systems ran by someone we know (so we know it runs well) is mentioned in this post: topic12977#p19125 ... should give you something to extrapolate from. We know of another system that at one point ran 25-30 cameras (most 1080p, some 1440p), and it is spec'ed as follows:
DELL PowerEdge R710
2x X5670
144GB ram
Samsung 850 SSD system drive
RAID 5 / drive pool archive drive
ESXI 6.5, Windows 10 VM, 24 vCPU, 32 GB RAM
The requirements will rise exponentially as the resolution grows, and will depend quite a bit on the amount of activity in the scenes as well.
To emphasize, CPU is just a part of the story here. Storage, and potentially, network equipment may prove to be just as critical to the success of such a deployment. Stability and quality of the cameras will also be important: can't imagine any system running 40-50 run of the mill "budget" cameras running trouble-free, no matter how beefy the server is.
Hopefully this provides useful in sizing your system. Let us know if we can help with any additional data point.