[asterisk-dev] maxsilence and minsecs

[asterisk at phreaknet.org]

On 1/19/2023 12:14 PM, Luke Escudé wrote:
> Voicemail.conf error "maxsilence should be less than minsecs or you 
> may get empty messages" does not make sense to me - The two settings 
> aren't really related, or at least not from a business case perspective.
>
> Assume maxsilence is 10 seconds, and minsecs is 5 seconds - That means 
> a voicemail left must be greater than 5 seconds in length, and the 
> system will wait up to 10 seconds of silence to automatically stop 
> recording.
>
> Conversely, if maxsilence is set to 5 seconds and minsecs is set to 10 
> seconds, then the voicemail must be greater than 10 seconds and the 
> system will wait up to 5 seconds to automatically stop recording.
The rationale is, say you have a message where nobody says something 
(and just hangs up or lets it time out).
Suppose you have minsecs=5 and maxsilence=10. The goal of the minsecs 
setting is to enforce a minimum length so overly brief messages are 
discarded. The maxsilence setting exists to not cut people off 
prematurely, which will happen if this setting is too low. However, if 
maxsilence is greater than minsecs, then the system will always wait at 
least minsecs time before ending the recording. In other words, this 
would render minsecs useless since no message will ever be too short for 
the system to accept it. I haven't tested this, but I believe that's how 
they interact from what I recall.