Maximum number of cameras that can be simultaneously displayed in one or more grids with the MxMC, so that
- the presentation is still fluid without video jitter and
- the user interface of the MxMC still reacts fast enough to user input.
Performance values have been verified with following components and settings:
- MxMC 1.5
- 108 different P3 cameras Firmware 4.4.2.69 and following settings:
XGA, 60% JPEG-Quality, MxPEG
Image Quality „normal“
Max. exposure time = 1/30s
-> The above settings lead to an average data-rate of about 2.5 MBit/s per camera.
Result on different systems:
Mac Pro, 2x Dual-Core Intel Xeon, 2.66GHz, 5GB RAM
– Win 7 Ultimate (64bit): 45 cameras
– Mac OS X 10.7:
- OpenGL activated (=Default): 35 cameras
- OpenGL deactivated: 45 cameras
Mac Pro, 12 Core Intel Xeon E5 (Hyper-Threaded), 2.7GHz, 16GB RAM
– Win 8.1 (64bit): 120 cameras !
– Mac OS X 10.10:
- OpenGL activated (=Default): 80 cameras
- OpenGL deactivated: 120 cameras
Important to know:
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Key criteria for display and number of cameras that can be displayed in parallel is the total number of frames per second, that MxMC has to decode and display.
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The Selection of different codecs (M-JPEG or MxPEG) has minor influence, as in both cases always full-frames are displayed. As a result, the bottleneck using Multicore systems is the displaying part (see next point).
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Decoding of the different video-streams always is executed within different threads (1 thread per stream) and therefore performed on different CPU-cores. Displaying all the decoded streams on the monitor and the processing of all User-Events is executed in the single „Main Thread“ and as such always in one single core. When using Multicore systems (as the one described above with 12 resp. 24 CPU-cores) the single CPU core performing the Main Thread leads into a bottleneck when exceeding a certain number of cameras whilst all other CPU cores may still be underutilized.
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Codec setting primarily influence the resulting stream data-rate. Especially when using Mx6 cameras with M-JPEG or MxPEG with huge Motion Ratio in the scenery, a data-rate of
20 MBit/s and more can be reached easily. When using up to 50 cameras in that case the overall network data-rate may reach the 1 GByte network limit.
The memory need of MxMC with above tests using 120 cameras was about 1.2 GByte
-> As a result we recommend a system with not so many (i.e. 8) but fast CPU-cores (e.g. >= 3GHz)
