asterisk users - Dec 2005 - Skips and Pops in Call Recordings

List users,

I'm using the Monitor application to record calls.  Most of the 
recordings are audible, but contain skips accompanied by a popping 
sound.  Sometimes they are isolated, sometimes they appear in groups.  
Call quality is excellent and seems unaffected by whatever is causing 
this problem.

If anyone has experienced this problem before, I'd appreciate if you'd 
share what the source was and any tips on eliminating it.  I contacted 
Digium tech support and they suggested turning off hyperthreading.  I 
have done that, but I won't know if it improved things until tomorrow.

The machine is running at a moderate call volume and is always at least 
90% idle.  I'm not seeing any "Avoided deadlock" messages in the
logs.
If you need any more information, I'd be happy to provide it.

Thank you,

Matthew Roth
InterMedia Marketing Solutions
Software Engineer and Systems Developer

Hello,

Need some more information here:
- hardware specs (including what kind of hard drives?)
- Linux kernel version
- running Xwindows?
- Asterisk version
- kind of calls you are recording (Zap, SIP, IAX, Meetme, ...)
- how many recordings at once

In my experience, HyperThreading does not cause recording problems,
it's usually a disk issue. When we had issues, switching to fast SCSI
drives on a MegaRAID 320-1 with the megaraid2 linux driver solved all
of our problems(skips and clicks/pops)

MATT---


On 12/12/05, Matt Roth <mroth@imminc.com> wrote:
> List users,
>
> I'm using the Monitor application to record calls.  Most of the
> recordings are audible, but contain skips accompanied by a popping
> sound.  Sometimes they are isolated, sometimes they appear in groups.
> Call quality is excellent and seems unaffected by whatever is causing
> this problem.
>
> If anyone has experienced this problem before, I'd appreciate if
you'd
> share what the source was and any tips on eliminating it.  I contacted
> Digium tech support and they suggested turning off hyperthreading.  I
> have done that, but I won't know if it improved things until tomorrow.
>
> The machine is running at a moderate call volume and is always at least
> 90% idle.  I'm not seeing any "Avoided deadlock" messages in
the logs.
> If you need any more information, I'd be happy to provide it.
>
> Thank you,
>
> Matthew Roth
> InterMedia Marketing Solutions
> Software Engineer and Systems Developer
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>I'm using the Monitor application to record calls.  Most of the 
>recordings are audible, but contain skips accompanied by a popping 
>sound.  Sometimes they are isolated, sometimes they appear in groups.  
>Call quality is excellent and seems unaffected by whatever is causing 
>this problem.
Matt Roth: FWIW, I am recording 1000-1500 calls a day (as of 8:52PM today,
1482 calls!) of various length on my Netfinity with the onboard IBM RAID
controller in RAID 5 Ultra 320 SCSI with suprisingly good quality. As the
other Matt indicated, maybe what is needed here is an intelligent controller
to offload some of the chore. 

No definite solution here, but at least it's another data point to compare.