asterisk users - Dec 2015 - CEL entries over ODBC several hours late

Hi guys

I'm running 1.8.32.3 with CEL logging over ODBC to MariaDB 5.5.41 on the
same Centos 7 machine.

I've noticed that the CDR entries made are all in-time, e. g. the call will
take place and the CDR entry is immediately written into the CDR table in
the MariaDB database.

However, CEL events for that CDR (which I need to process for a realtime
display feature in my dialer software) are always several hours after the
fact. E. g. I will make a call at 09:30, see the call immediate pop up in
the MariaDB CDR table, but only at about 15:15 that afternoon will I see
that call's CEL events come into the CEL table, from Asterisk.... I have
examined the `show processlist` in MariaDB exhaustively to establish this
fact.

The system doesn't appear loaded, load average is about 1.1 - it's a
quad-coare HT Intel Xeon E3-1225 with 8GB of DRAM running on an SSD for main
storage.

The system processes about 30 000 calls every 8 hour day, and services 90
SIP phones.

I can stop and restart the MariaDB instance for several minutes, when I
restart it it immediately picks up on the "slow" CELs from where it
was
interrupted - more evidence that Asterisk is very slowly streaming the CELs
through. I thought MariaDB was the bottleneck, but apparently not?

If I make test inserts from a script into the CEL table, all of them
complete so quickly a time indication does not even register for the query
in MariaDB. Simple test queries on the CEL table are also instant, not even
counting in the internal MariaDB query duration timer.

Can anybody explain why this is that the CELs asterisk emits over ODBC are
so delayed? Are CELs intended NOT to be realtime?

So, logically, Asterisk appears to be caching CELs to the tune of hundreds
of thousands of them at any given time - meaning if it is stopped (either
killed, or core stop gracefully'ed, or just "core stop now") 
potentially
hundreds of thousands of CELs will just evaporate irretrivably.

What can I do to mitigate this extremely slow populating of CELs over ODBC?

Thanks

On Wed, Dec 9, 2015 at 6:32 AM, Stefan Viljoen <viljoens at
verishare.co.za>
wrote:
> Hi guys
>
> I'm running 1.8.32.3 with CEL logging over ODBC to MariaDB 5.5.41 on
the
> same Centos 7 machine.
>
> I've noticed that the CDR entries made are all in-time, e. g. the call
will
> take place and the CDR entry is immediately written into the CDR table in
> the MariaDB database.
>
> However, CEL events for that CDR (which I need to process for a realtime
> display feature in my dialer software) are always several hours after the
> fact. E. g. I will make a call at 09:30, see the call immediate pop up in
> the MariaDB CDR table, but only at about 15:15 that afternoon will I see
> that call's CEL events come into the CEL table, from Asterisk.... I
have
> examined the `show processlist` in MariaDB exhaustively to establish this
> fact.
>
> The system doesn't appear loaded, load average is about 1.1 - it's
a
> quad-coare HT Intel Xeon E3-1225 with 8GB of DRAM running on an SSD for
> main
> storage.
>
> The system processes about 30 000 calls every 8 hour day, and services 90
> SIP phones.
>
> I can stop and restart the MariaDB instance for several minutes, when I
> restart it it immediately picks up on the "slow" CELs from where
it was
> interrupted - more evidence that Asterisk is very slowly streaming the CELs
> through. I thought MariaDB was the bottleneck, but apparently not?
>
> If I make test inserts from a script into the CEL table, all of them
> complete so quickly a time indication does not even register for the query
> in MariaDB. Simple test queries on the CEL table are also instant, not even
> counting in the internal MariaDB query duration timer.
>
> Can anybody explain why this is that the CELs asterisk emits over ODBC are
> so delayed? Are CELs intended NOT to be realtime?
>
> So, logically, Asterisk appears to be caching CELs to the tune of hundreds
> of thousands of them at any given time - meaning if it is stopped (either
> killed, or core stop gracefully'ed, or just "core stop now") 
potentially
> hundreds of thousands of CELs will just evaporate irretrivably.
>
> What can I do to mitigate this extremely slow populating of CELs over ODBC?
>
>
Asterisk does not buffer CEL entries. If anything, it pushes the entries
out to ODBC much more aggressively than what you would get with CDRs.

An event is generated in Asterisk that corresponds to the CEL entry. That
entry is pushed over a message bus (the 'event' message bus in 1.8 - 11;
'stasis' in 12+) and is picked up by the CEL core. The events are
immediately sent to the registered backends, who also immediately write it
out to the backend they support. In the case of ODBC, this immediately does
an INSERT into the appropriate table.

In Asterisk 1.8, you can look for a verbose level 11 message that will show
when this occurs:

        ast_verb(11, "[%s]\n", ast_str_buffer(sql));

In later versions, this was turned into a debug level 3 message (as
anything over a verbose 5/debug 5 was cleaned up).

If you see that message, then that will tell you when Asterisk *believes*
it has written the CEL entry. If that doesn't show up in the database, then
it is either in the ODBC driver or the Maria database.

If you don't see that message, then something is preventing those events
from getting delivered inside of Asterisk, which would only occur if you
had some other serious call related issues occurring.

Matt

-- 
Matthew Jordan
Digium, Inc. | Director of Technology
445 Jan Davis Drive NW - Huntsville, AL 35806 - USA
Check us out at: http://digium.com & http://asterisk.org
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