asterisk users - Apr 2006 - call center running Asterisk - sound quality-critical!

Just good old monitor with no mixing onto the scsi drive. 

-----Original Message-----
From: asterisk-users-bounces@lists.digium.com
[mailto:asterisk-users-bounces@lists.digium.com] On Behalf Of Tamas
Sent: Wednesday, April 12, 2006 4:55 AM
To: Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion
Subject: Re: [Asterisk-Users] call center running Asterisk - sound
quality-critical!

Hi,

how do you record calls? Monitor app. or MixMonitor or something else?
How does your storage backend looks like?
What kind of channels do you use? Do you record IAX2 channels?
Regards,
 Tamas

Wai Wu wrote:
> You got to be kidding about 53 calls being recorded at sametime is an
issue. I have done at least twice as many on my dual xeon 3.4Ghz system
and had no problem as clients like to record every call that goes
through the system. Then again, in my system, the in and out channels
are mixed first before they are written to the disk.
>
> ________________________________
>
> From: asterisk-users-bounces@lists.digium.com on behalf of Matt Roth
> Sent: Tue 4/11/2006 5:25 PM
> To: Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion
> Subject: Re: [Asterisk-Users] call center running Asterisk - sound
quality- critical!
>
>
>
>  >>On 4/10/06, Dov Bigio <dovb@terra.com.br> wrote:
>  >>
>  >>Hi,
>  >>
>  >>I am using Asterisk for a call center on a Dual Xeon machine..
>  >>
>  >>I currently have
>  >>
>  >>109 active channels
>  >>53 active calls
>  >>
>  >>Every body is complaining about quality and cpu is around 80%
idle.
>  >>
>  >>Is there any tuning I can do???
>  >>
>  >>Besides that, Asterisk normally goes down once or twice per day...
>  >>
>  >>Thank you
>  >>
>  >>Dov
>  >>
>  > C F wrote:
>  >
>  >From what you say it sounds that the problem is not with asteisk, 
> but  >the way it's configured. Asterisk should *never* go down that
often.
>  >Asterisk as a normal PBX should run without a restart for as long as
> >there is power to the box, in the case of a call center if I would  
> >hear of a restart once a week I would accept it, but still would look
> >for ways of improving it beyond that.
>  >
>  >You complain about call quality, what type of phones are thes? What
> >codec? are they all local?
>  >
>
> Dov,
>
> I agree with the first response.  Your system is failing at an 
> abnormal rate.  Please share more information about your setup so that
> we can help you.  Hardware, software, OS, configuration...there's no 
> such thing as too many details when trying to work out these problems 
> via a mailing list.
>
> Information about what tasks you are asking Asterisk to perform and 
> how you have it configured to do so is vital.  In particular, I'm 
> curious to know if you're recording the calls using the Monitor() 
> application?  53 concurrent calls being recorded directly to disk is 
> about where things start to go south (it's an I/O bottleneck, not 
> CPU).  If you have a Digium card in the box, make sure that it's not 
> sharing an interrupt with any other hardware.  The list and the wiki 
> both have plenty of information to help you with that.
>
> Matthew Roth
> InterMedia Marketing Solutions
> Software Engineer and Systems Developer
>   
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Wai Wu wrote:

 > You got to be kidding about 53 calls being recorded at sametime is an
 > issue. I have done at least twice as many on my dual xeon 3.4Ghz system
 > and had no problem as clients like to record every call that goes
 > through the system.

Nope.  We took our system to MCI's development lab and ran it against an 
Abacus 5000.  Things fell apart on the 64 call test.  We looked at the 
logs and saw a massive amount of disk I/O, so we set up a RAM disk to 
write the recordings to.  We were then able to successfully test up to 
512 simultaneous calls.

Looking at this list and the wiki, you'll see that many other users ran 
into the same issue at around 60 simultaneous recordings via Monitor().

Tamas wrote:

 > how do you record calls? Monitor app. or MixMonitor or something else?

Wai Wu wrote:

 > Then again, in my system, the in and out channels are mixed first before
 > they are written to the disk.
 > Just good old monitor with no mixing onto the scsi drive.

These statements seem contradictory.  I know of no way (short of a 
custom patch) to tell Monitor() to mix the in and out legs prior to 
writing them to disk.  On the other hand, MixMonitor() does just that 
and I believe it also buffers the writes in a way that circumvents the 
I/O bottleneck associated with Monitor().

Matthew Roth
InterMedia Marketing Solutions
Software Engineer and Systems Developer

Matt Roth wrote:
> These statements seem contradictory.  I know of no way (short of a
> custom patch) to tell Monitor() to mix the in and out legs prior to
> writing them to disk.  On the other hand, MixMonitor() does just that
> and I believe it also buffers the writes in a way that circumvents the
> I/O bottleneck associated with Monitor().
Both of these statements are correct.