[asterisk-dev] possible zaptel problem with SMP and RAID1

[Steve Totaro]

Steven Critchfield wrote:
> On Mon, 2007-07-09 at 21:34 +0200, Martin Vít wrote:
>   
>> Hi, 
>>
>> we have in production several SMP xeon and one core duo 2 servers
>> always with sata sw RAID1
>>
>> all xeon servers works well on digium 4xE1 with full loads
>>
>> core 2 duo with asus server board using digium PCI 1xE1 were useless
>> because it constantly 
>> generates taps to the sound. On another board it works well. (we have
>> tryed moving digium 
>> into another PCI slots, no IRQ sharing etc...) Sangoma pci express
>> solves this issue with the 
>> same configuration.
>>
>> I dont believe that RAID1 is causing this. If not sure, try to not
>> write anything to the disk. 
>>     
>
> In my case we don't use software RAID _EVER_. I despise software RAID.
> Also in my case, not writing to disk is not an option. Our business is
> about the recording of calls. The recording must go somewhere. Our
> choice was to upgrade a few CPU intensive apps to distribute the work to
> somewhere else. Also to implement a policy about interactive use of
> machines doing production work.
>
> But you even point out that some boards are just not able to handle the
> realtime workload. The time spent trying to figure out what it is in
> such a complex system that make those boards less than ideal isn't worth
> the amount of money to just buy a different board and try again.   
>
>   

Like a Sangoma board?

You should try OrecX and passive recording for your needs if you have 
not considered this before.  I could record ~200 simultaneous calls with 
OrecX's software with perfect quality.  With Asterisk, all calls would 
start getting choppy at ~75 simultaneous calls.  With OrecX's solution, 
the Asterisk box has no knowledge that the call is even being recorded, 
so no I/O, no drive space, no bottlenecks.

Thanks,
Steve Totaro