"System Requirements"

CQC's system requirements are quite reasonable for this type of powerful, multi-user, networked product. But it can be used in a number of different configurations, each of which has different requirements. This section will cover the various requirements of CQC and some of the variations you might encounter. Note that these requirements do not include the .Net Interface Viewer which is a CE.Net based device. See the Hardware section of the FAQ for information on the available small clients.

Operating System

CQC runs on Windows XP SP2 or beyond, Windows 2000, Windows Server 2000, Windows Server 2003, and Vista. It will also run fine on Embedded XP as long as the built image doesn't remove anything that CQC depends on. Embedded XP is particularly useful on tablet style clients which are just running user interfaces. You can install a 'standalone interface viewer' mode image on such tablets so that there are no background processes running on it, just support libraries and the interface viewer.

CQC has been tested on Vista and should run without issues. But unless you must use Vista for other reasons, it probably isn't worth using it for a CQC client, particularly a Kiosk style client where none of the benefits of Vista would be involved. It would just be unneeded overhead relative to XP.

Disk Space/Hard Drives

A common CQC installation will take about 50MBs to 75MB of disk space, but that can increase if you install a lot of images for use in your user interfaces or web pages. Each time you install, the previous installation is saved away as a backup, so the actual space used is closer to 100MBs to 125MBs, maybe as much as 150MBs if you installed a lot of large images (which can be be a few MB's each if they are large and don't compress well.)

Given the size of modern hard drives, this would obviously only be a drop in the bucket. If you are looking to create a dedicated controller box, a 40GB drive, probably the smallest you can get these days, would be more than sufficient for the operating system and CQC's needs, as long as there are no media files involved (music and movies.) A very useful configuration for a dedicated automation controller is two 40GB drives in a RAID1 configuration, to insure that you can lose one drive and the controller will continue to run. At the price of a 40GB drive, and it doesn't need to be particularly fast, this redundancy is well worth it.

If you are using the machine to serve up music, then you'd want to make those drives more like 300GB to 500GB drives, which will hold a very large music collection easily. There's not really any problem using such a system in the same RAID1 type configuration as above, with CQC and the OS running on that same array, unless you are trying to serve up a lot of media streams. If you are serving up video data, then you will want to provide a dedicated machine for that in most cases, or a NAS box, because video streaming is much more I/O intensive and performance sensitive. It's just best to keep that separate from your automation controller.

If the system is going to be a server to other CQC clients, the obviously you are going to want to use fast drives and have enough power  so that you can serve up that data quickly, in order to keep the performance of the clients snappy. You might also, if running XP or Vista, set the system's load balancing setting to favor background processes over foreground. Windows Server machines already have this leaning. This is done via the System applet in the control panel. select the Advanced tab, then the Settings button in the Performance section of that tab, and then again select the Advanced tab of the Performance Options dialog. You can also, in the Visual Effects tab of that same dialog, select the 'best performance' option for an XP machine being used as a server, to put less emphasis on pretty interface and more on speed.

Memory

Memory requirements can vary pretty considerably according to the particular type of CQC installation on a given machine. It can vary from around 20MB up to 100MBs, and even more if you are running a media server. Just to give some perspective, below are the numbers from a real system:

Component Installed Memory Used (MBs)
Configuration Server. - Always installed except in the 'standalone interface viewer' configuration. 7.3
Log Server - Only on Master Server machine 7.1
Name Server - Only on Master Server machine 7.1
App Shell - Always installed except in the 'standalone interface viewer' configuration 11.7
Data Server - Only on Master Server 15
Event Server - Only on Master Server 16
XML Gateway Server 16.2
CQCServer - Anywhere you need drivers loaded (5 smallish drivers loaded in this example) 23.3
Web Server 14
Interface Viewer 23

Total:

 140.7

Based on these numbers, and the actual components that would get installed for a given configuration, you can estimate how much memory CQC will consume. The above system is a fairly worst case non-media server scenario with all possible options running on a single machine, plus it's running the interface viewer, basically a standalone kiosk style configuration. In a purely client side installation, you would get the Configuration Server plus the App Shell plus the Interface Viewer (plus other admin tools of course but they are not left up all the time), so around 35MBs. If it was client tools plus CQCServer so that you can run some local drivers, it would be more like 50MBs. A dedicated Master Server Machine would require about 50MBs.

Based on these numbers, it is probably not recommended to run a single machine configuration with all options in less than a 256MB machine, and even then you should strip the operating system down to the bare essentials. You can get the XP memory image down to around 100MBs if you turn off all the stuff that wouldn't be required for a touchscreen client, including the XP look and feel service (which is fine for a kiosk style machine since you never see the OS anyway.) That, combined with a full load of all possible options as in the example above would end up around 170MBs. leaving under 100MBs of space for operating system file cache and transient usage by the OS and CQC in a 256MB machine. That might still be pushing it a bit according to the types of drivers you end up loading.

For a client side or client side plus one or two optional servers (such as CQC Server or Web Server), 256MBs should be fine, though even there it would be advisable to turn off OS services that you don't need. For a pure standalone interface viewer system, the memory requirements are quite low since the only CQC application running is the interface viewer.

If you are running media repository drivers, then you want to have a fairly substantial amount of memory available if you have a large media collection, and 512MBs is probably the bare minimum recommended amount, because the media driver will cache cover art images and media metadata as they are accessed, so that it can serve them up quickly in subsequent requests. It is highly recommended that you rescale your cover art images using the CQCRescaleImgs program (see the Optimize Cover Art Browsing item in the Media Management section), so that they both take up minimal memory and can be served over the network quickly. Cover art is often far larger and of far higher quality than is required for browsing. This is only required if using the J.River or file tag based repositories. Some, such as DVD Profiler offer smaller images (in the Thumbnails directory), and others such as the CQSL and iTunes repositories will automatically rescale images.

CPU Requirements

The CPU requirements of CQC are fairly low. For a standalone system that is not acting as server to any other CQC clients, and which is not running anything but the OS and CQC, then a 1GHz system will do quite well. The example system above was running on a small VIA mini-ITX board running at 1Ghz and it performs admirably, and for testing purposes is often acting as a Master Server for two other systems without any real performance concerns (but none of them are being used simultaneously.) For a larger number of clients, something with a little more power might be indicated.

For a client side machine that is just looking to run user interfaces and nothing else, it can actually be quite low powered. You can do a 'standalone interface viewer' configuration, in which there are no background programs, just the user interface and its supporting libraries. This kind of configuration can easily run on sub-1Ghz eXP or XP based tablets as long as the graphics performance is sufficient to support the level of interface slickness you want to have. If you are going to run user interfaces that make heavy use of complex images, with lots of alpha blending, and which make use of the blur style text effects and slide-out templates now offered by the Interface Viewer, then you will want to have considerably more than a minimal CPU and video card, because these types of features require quick CPUs in order to stay snappy.

For a machine that is running local drivers and one or two optional servers like CQCServer and Web Server, plus client side tools, this could also work just fine on a sub-1GHz machine, though if running a lot of drivers something in the 1GHz range or better would be preferable to keep the performance snappy. Any time you are running CQCServer, you are effectively serving out device data to any other CQC programs in the network that needs to talk to those devices.

If you are running a 'full smash' of all components, media repository drivers, and acting as a server to other CQC clients in the network, then you should run a configuration that is not unlike what you would run for any such server type application, with plenty of CPU, plenty of extra memory for CQC and the OS to cache data in, fast drives probably a RAID array, and if running XP that the load balance be pushed towards the back end emphasis so that more resources are allocated towards serving clients quickly. Something along the lines of a 2+GHz machine would be appropriate, and possibly a multi-core machine if serving a good number of clients.

Video Requirements

Unless you are running user interfaces via the Interface Viewer, the video requirements are basically just anything that Windows will run on, since you'd only need to run administrative tools, which have no particular requirements beyond the most basic. If you are going to run user interfaces that are heavy on complex images with lots of transparency, alpha based blending and blurring, and popout templates, then you are going to want a fairly modern PCI-e style graphics card with a good bit of memory so that it can cache images and provide the system with plenty of onboard scratch memory to work with. This will keep everything snappy and smooth. This will also require more CPU performance since some of this work depends on the main CPU.

Always be sure to upgrade your graphics driver to the latest one from the manufacturer. It is not uncommon for the driver that ships with Windows to be a number of important steps behind. In particular we have found that you often need to update your driver in order to enable hardware supported alpha blending, which is very important if you are doing complex alpha transparency based images in your user interfaces.

If you are going to do particularly complex interfaces with logs of alpha blended images and use slide-out templates that are partially translucent and so forth, then you want a good quality video card that definitely provides hardware based alpha blending and that has lots of memory for caching images and a fast system to video bus.

Examples

Here we'll give some basic examples of what would be conservative estimates of requirements for various common CQC machine configurations, both front and back end.

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