[Asterisk-Users] RAID/SCSI/IDE/SATA and a TE405P (or T100P) card. Should I expect problems?

[Rich Adamson]

> > However, reading all these posts about hardware incompatibiliites and little
> > issues with different hardware has gotten me a little concerned about this
> > migration/changeover. IRQ's, poor quality controllers, dual processor's,
> > raid vs ide, etc. etc. can all affect a call. If the server isn't just
> > right, I could encounter issues.
> 
> I personally think most of these issues are red herrings. Most interrupts 
> should not be held long enough to interfere with the tdm interrupts, 
> possibly with the exception of video interrupts routines. There should not 
> even be a problem with shared interrupts.
> 
> One thing that could make a lot of difference is the pci bus latency
> settings. Since this depends on all the other elements on the pci bus as
> well this may cause things to miss their deadlines. Since the TE405
> (unlike the older T1/E1 adapters) is bus mastering this can be an issue.  
> Of course, if there is sufficient buffering on chip this point is moot.  
> Some bioses get the caluclations wrong, or at least used to. This made
> some cards miss their deadlines.
> 
> Does anyone know if this could be the source of some of the problems
> people are experiencing?
> 
> As a reference we have missed the deadline on 824 out of 3034245416 
> interrupts on our machine (2 E1 circuits, Fujitsu 1U server, one ide disk) 
> even though we have hit the disks pretty hard from time to time. 

Peter (and everyone else that actually reads this),

There are lots of opinions floating around and almost _no_ suggestions
on narrowing down the issues. It's obvious from the many posts to the
list there is an issue, however there are far more responses that use
adjectives and adverbs then there are "here's how to help qualify the 
issues".

It would be very handy for those of us that aren't performance literate
to hear something in terms of "how do we better understand the root cause
(or eliminate a guess)". If you've got some suggestions as to how to 
help qualify the issue (regardless of what that might be), there are 
a lot of people that would be willing to run a command and post results.

Suggestions?

Rich