Milestone 2x Server Capacities With Enhanced VMD

Definitely agree that the spindle count/speed is the bottleneck right now.  There may be servers capable of 3.1 Gbps, I just don't know what it is.  Perhaps all SSDs?  Either way the price tag on that server is likely to be hefty.

Milestone motion detection does work very well though.  I am excited that they're able to get the CPU load down as that has classically been a challenge with Milestone server based motion detection.  Again, their motion detection processor load for server based motion detection was already pretty good if you have the processor to support it.

About all I can find at the moment is the following. I'm travelling today but when I find more I'll post it here.

"Tested with these system specifications: Intel i7-6700K, Windows 10, Intel HD Graphics 530, 16GB, RAM, video feed: H264 –1080p, VMD on key frames and 12% pixels, 30 FPS, 2.5 Mbit/S"

https://www.milestonesys.com/press-releases/20170215-highestvms/

It's not often a customer has a storage subsystem capable of maxing out the speed of the database. And under most circumstances, the CPU is not a bottleneck except when the system is perhaps under-specced. But the real value in hardware accelerated motion detection IMO (for systems where server side MD is required/desired) is not that you can put more cameras on one server but that you can reduce the cost a bit by speccing a less expensive CPU. In the scheme of things this might not be a significant difference based on the overall project costs but it's something anyway.

The other potential benefit is that if you are "transcoding" video on the server in order to send a lower quality image to clients, this would be massively improved by hardware acceleration. I say potential because I'm not positive that transcoding is also taking advantage of QSV. I'll check up on that as well.

My personal opinion is that 3.1Gbps is indeed bragging rights. In practice, most hardware will fall over before that. But I suppose it's worth bragging while it lasts :)

Fully agree! This is a great challenge. To decouple software from hardware - exact camera from exact server.

That isn't the test configuration that was used for the hardware accelerated VMD because the E5 Xeon processors do not support Quick Sync which is what our software is using for the hardware acceleration.  That looks like testing from the reference architecture that we did with Dell though which is separate, but equally interesting.

I think your link was supposed to go here: Milestone / Dell Reference Architecture.  Right now, it is linking back to an unknown page in IPVM.

In regards to using camera based VMD versus server based VMD that this article talks about, there are pros and cons to both.  The main pro of camera based is that the resource needs on the server are drastically reduced.  However, I believe the pros of server based outweigh the cons:

• Some cameras are incredibly terrible at doing motion detection.  If you use server based motion detection, it doesn't matter what the cameras capabilities are because you know what you will get server side.  Obviously, the server side motion detection could be poor as well but as UI1 pointed out above, the Milestone motion detection works very well.  Our motion detection is also optimized (like Axxon and others) when using the default settings because it is only detecting on the keyframe and only analyzing 12% of the pixels.
• In most cases, camera based motion detection has to be configured by visiting the cameras web interface.  I know some VMSs can do this client side for some cameras but I'm not aware of any that can do it for all cameras (I could definitely be wrong on this though).
• When using Milestone XProtect Expert and Corporate, the Smart Search functionality (searching on motion after the fact) relies on server side motion.  When we are doing the motion detection we are saving the metadata related to the motion.  With that functionality, instead of searching for motion on the fly (like most competitors do and we do in the Enterprise and below software), we can quickly search the metadata and present thumbnails showing the results.  You can see an example of it at about the 4:00 mark in this video: Milestone Smart Search

That's my thoughts at least.  I'm sure there could be a lot of debating around this and I could certainly be missing some other pros for camera side motion detection.  In my nearly 7 years at Milestone though, the only time I have come across a customer using camera based motion detection is when they have a camera on a cellular style connection where they have to pay for the bandwidth.  In that type of scenario they set the camera up to only stream when the camera detects motion.  I can count the times I have run across that on one hand though.

Hi Dave,

What version of our software are you running (e.g., Corporate 2016 R2, Professional 2014, etc.)?

Here it is a quick checklist:

1. Make sure you're either running version 10.2B, or at least have applied this hotfix if running 10.2a. Alternatively, if you're running 10.2a, you might consider upgrading to 2017 R1 which includes a couple more improvements from 10.2B.
2. Do not archive to the same drive as the live storage location.
3. If using antivirus, always add your live/archive drives to the exception list
4. If archiving to a NAS, make sure the connection is responsive and reliable. If archiving to EMC Isilon, bump up the number of archive threads from 1 to 3 or 4.
5. Consider bumping up the size of the queue from 50 frames to 100-200. This can be useful if the storage performance is only momentarily slow. A larger queue allows us to buffer more frames to memory in the event the storage cannot receive the data fast enough.

If the issue persists, then you may be looking at a storage performance limitation, though it still could be software. First thing is to try to rule the storage out. I typically use Windows Performance Monitor to check the following counters:

If the Idle time is really low consistently, could be the storage.

If the avg disk sec/write is higher than 15-20ms (.020 seconds), could be storage.

If the avg disk write queue length is consistently higher than 1, and especially spiking to 5-10+, could be storage.

I've worked with your Milestone reseller before and they are quite good in my experience. If you haven't brought this up with them already, I high recommend it. We will help them identify whether we're looking at a storage performance issue or whether it could be software instead.