Hikvision NVR Load Tested

I have experienced similar issues to this, albeit not loading the system heavily by any stretch of the means.  iVMS-4200 seems to be a resource hog.  Im sure they are not pouring resources  into development given it's cost of Free ninety nine....

What were the CODECS used vis a vis h.264/h.265, smart or not?

Was the NVR set with RAID enabled on the HDD?

There is a CPU burden with RAID if it's a software implementation, and will effect the bitrate throughput. I come across a few so called high end NVRs supporting RAID.

Update:

I just notice clicking to the link Hikvision spec even say this, from 320Mb/s to 200Mb/s is somewhat major hit on performance a 63% from the original.

I would feel cheated calling RAID which in the world of PCs would give mostly a performance enhancement in throughput! not a decrease..

PC based NVRs would use a raid controller, unless they are brave to use a AMD threadripper CPU with a X399 chipset and a NVME raid configuration!

I wonder if RAID can be enabled to see what differences it makes to playback performances as well as image quality considering we are hitting the max already.

I had to rip out 2 separate systems because of iVMS last year. One 16 channel system and one 6 channels. Put in Exacq and it cleared all my problems. 

Ethan, thank you for performing this series of tests.  It confirmed a few of my own experiences.  I'd love to further explore a couple of quirky asides that I have come up on.  It seems that the more frustrating issues are on multi camera live display;  recording seems to work smoothly.  

1. Could you reproduce a known IVMS lag set up but this time, have the IVMS connect directly to the cameras for live view, bypassing the NVR, and see if that made a difference?  (I posted an experience with this when using it for static live view monitoring on wall mounted displays).  My experience was that it didn't seem to lock up. 

2. The 96xx NVR supports multiple HDMI outputs.  Would connecting multiple displays for a wall mount live view perform better than running the live view through a Windows PC running IVMS?

3. I haven't noticed this lag issue running some of the "Turbo" HD-TVI" DVR's and IVMS nearly as severe as the IP NVR's.  These camera feeds are both 1080p, so it's confusing as to why. Any thoughts?

Thanks again

 Have you tried the Web App with same setup?

Several times I have found the Web App behaved netter for Live Viewing (Same with re branded Wbox)

Hi

We're experiencing these issues with iVMS 4200 too. One thing is clear the Hikvision NVRs 9600-i8 NVR are mature and perform extremely well. iVMS 4200 is barely adequate. 

Another issue is when you save several views on iVMS 4200.. If you have several views, they seem to load all the saved views at the same time. This at least, slows the best PCs to a crawl and would crash average but Hik-minimum compliance PCs.

Truth to be told, we are looking forward for a better VMS from Hik. The 5200 doesn't seem to be widely available in the US.

It would be good if the usual suspect (Milestone, Exacq, etc...) would support Hik' NVRs in a native fashion . IOW they retain their recording capabilities and the VMS controls and manage these and the monitoring, searching, etc .. The usual VMS stuff :)

Agreed with the occasional client crashes - long standing Hik issue that has improved in recent years - but is still annoying.

Other annoying features is the lack of proportionate zoom on digital zoom and having to resort to native video in order to view corridor mode cameras.

Although the IVMS does support multiple images well and can make use of the auxiliary screens, we've had massively better results using the fantastic DS-6908UDI HDMI decoders. Bear in mind  the units only support 4k images on HALF their inputs with standard HD on the other half.

Slap on the DS1600KI keyboard and you have a great front end with minimal usage of the IVMS.

It would be nice to see IPVM put together this combination of kit and then see what Hik competitors can do to replicate, as it's a strong offering hat most others can't get close to, in terms of hardware. 

Ethan, if you still have that setup it would be nice to know how much GPU is getting used when doing the local viewing.   I am sure you have a copy of GPUz for that.

This will let users know if a GTX1060 is needed or can a lesser card do the task.

That's why I opened this article and I couldn't find the most important thing about iVMS testing – testing the GPU load with different types of graphical processors.

Recommendations for the testing team: you should describe your test setup and not just say "it meets specs". Hardware model names, OS version and build, drivers' versions, etc. Open tom's hw guide, overclockers or any other PC hardware testing site. Those guys do it for decades and you don't need to invent the wheel.

So, I opened the latest version of iVMS-4200 on my PC, which is i5-6600/16GB/NVMe 960EVO SSD/Nvidia GTX 1060 6GB, updated drivers, updated windows. GPU-Z 2.5.0.

Opened 64 cameras, most of those are 4 mpx, some mix of 3mpx and 8 mpx as well. CPU load jumped 40% up (decodeprocess.exe), GPU just 10%, RAM usage is close to 500MB, disk usage is close to 0%, network load 7-12 mbps. iVMS became unresponsive but still showed some movement for most of the cameras. Around 10 cameras showed artifacts.

After that, I repeated with just 36 cameras loaded. iVMS became fully functional: no glitches, no artifacts, no frame drops or freezes. All the numbers were the same, except CPU load - decoder process took just 2-10% of the CPU time.

Tried Aux screen preview (25 cams) and main view (25 cams). iVMS worked fine, same numbers as I had with 36 cameras. 

Having the same amount of cameras (36) and switching the view from 36 to 64 makes something to decoder process, so it consumes more CPU time (10% - 20% jump).  Adding cameras to 64cam view makes iVMS extremely slow and not usable. Apparently, there's a problem with a software optimization.

System Configuration – Image – Hardware decoding preferred setting makes no difference to the PC components load.

The low GPU suggests that a Quadro P600 might be a better value and it is the design point made for 24/7 usage.

I replaced Hikvision NVRs on 4 projects due to instability of the iVMS-4200. In every case, I had a loaded i7 processor for the client PC and had unacceptable latency/dropouts and freezing.  NVR as stated worked fine.  The support from Hikvision was (including local reps/techs) was severly lacking.  They blamedthe issues on my client PC. Lesson learned!!

We have several (10+) facilities with the DS-9664-NI NVR with 50-64 cameras pushing 5-8mp each on stream 1 recording to the NVR with audio and and 1.4mp stream 2 for ivms remote viewing. As long as you use an Intel i7 4770 CPU (that is the oldest one that will perform consistently viewing 32 cameras at a time) or any Intel CPU with quicksync and at least HD4000 graphics you shouldnt have a problem with remote viewing 32 cameras at a time on a single 1080p or 4k display. The HDMI 4K out of the NVR is always your best bet for minimal latency and reliability when cycling views. IVMS crashes often on redraws if you change the layout. The new software seems to be a little more consistent, we saw almost no benefit when using nvidia or amd gpu on remote live view systems.