asterisk users - Jun 2006 - Queue errors when phones are down, and possible solution

Greetings all,

We run a pretty big Asterisk setup including several satelite offices.  We use
one central switch and all our offices are connected via MPLS network.  We have
had some issues with our network at times and it seems like it causes some
corresponding problems with Asterisk specifically related to
"app_queue.so".  Granted we do have some serious volume both in terms
of the number of agents we have on the phones and the number of calls comming in
on our switch.

Previously we were using the "rrmemory" method of distributing our
calls, but in an effort to see if it helped with our issues we switched to using
the "random" method.  Since then we've had some bad network
outages and Asterisk seems to hold together far better.

The types of problems we had were things such as calls not getting routed to
agents (across the board) or agents not being able to log in or out of queues
(again across the board).

If anyone else has had these issues have you found anything that helps?  If you
have this problem and have not tried it I would definitely suggest switching
your call allocation to "random".

Thanks and hope this helps some of you,

Franklin Webb
Assistant IT Project Leader
Inter Medi@ Marketing Solutions
610-701-9670
fwebb@imminc.com