Dual processors system

[a94cobra 0]

Will a Geovision card and software make use of a dual processor system?

[Jasper 0]

Not as of yet.

 

The system can offer more stability though. Also the dual core procs run cooler, which is always a good thing.

[a94cobra 0]

Well, I have my DVR machine set aside so no one uses it. Cause it gets kinda slow while trying to do other things. Which is fine. Its main purpose is to record. But if it were a dual processor machine, I might be able to do a few smaller tasks without interrupting the DVR side of the machine.

 

Alternatively if I just throw another machine in the rack with a KVM switch It would be like a dual machine. Trying to see which way to go there.

[Jasper 0]

Well it is always recommended to only use the computer for DVR purposes in a professional install. A single processor is all you need.

 

With a Dual Core you would be able to use the machine to do other tasks while it is recording, but depending on what those tasks are and what software you load you could be asking for potential problems. You could browse the internet and do email, no problem.

 

More software installed though, just adds more variables that can cause a problem that possibly can disrupt your security system.

[Thomas 0]

From a software end, the dual cores offers some intresting advantages. Alot of applications are single threaded (all tasks run in serial, games do this alot becuase it keeps the timing of sound and video in sync) but what we do is generally multi-threaded. In simple terms, cpu 1 handles cameras 1 to 8 and cpu 2 handles 9 to 16. This leave enough overhead to start doing intresting work with facial IDs and all of the other "CSI" tech.

[Jasper 0]

Is that with Geo software, VideoInsight and mayae other DVR cards?

 

Is their software optimized for utilizing the second core on the chip?

[Thomas 0]

I don't know about Geovision. I could guess based on CPU usage but I don't have a copy of it. I know we do it and you can see the results when you run us in a SMP or dual core system.

[a94cobra 0]

Thomas, who is we?

[Thomas 0]

Video Insight. I am one of our sales reps. It explains my sig.

[G22 0]

Smith, and Wesson, and me.

[Javik 0]

It's been almost a year and a half since this was last discussed. Has anything changed in that time? Is the latest version multithreaded yet?

 

 

With some single-threaded software, sometimes the dual-core performance is actually worse than with a single core, because the old single-threaded software doesn't know what to do with the multiple cores.

 

For single-threaded programs that exhibit this problem, if you use the Win 2000/XP Windows Task Manager to assign the software to just a single CPU, then the suddenly performance goes way up. (Right click and choose Set Affinity.)

 

(Before the Second Life game client was rewritten to be multithreaded, it would normally start up running poorly at about 15 fps on a dual core system, but when assigned to run on one CPU only, it would shoot up to 60+ fps.)

 

By going through the Task Manager process list and hand-setting affinity for all processes, you can assign only the Geovision app to one of the CPUs, and restrict everything else to the other CPUs, so that the Geovision app always gets one of the CPUs all to itself regardless of whatever else the server is doing. (This setting is not kept through a reboot, though.)

 

If the Geovision software still is not multithreaded, has anyone experimented with setting affinity like this, to see if it improves capture performance?

 

-Javik