[Asterisk-Users] * box hangs after a couple of days...

[Florian Overkamp]

Hi Steven, 

This mail and my first response did cross, so here are some additional
thoughts.

> -----Original Message-----
> Then you show how little you have learned about the hardware 
> and the system in general. ALL Zapata based hardware 
> generates 1000 interupts a second regardless of activity. It 
> does so because a choice was made that the complexity and 
> cost involved in adding buffers and hardware to service those 
> buffers was too much. It was deemed that under most 
> situations, a PC is capable of handling that kind of load. 

Agreed. I've been rubbed in this issue quite a long time ago, and have
learned from it. In my setups this only became a problem on very high loads
and disk-io, not in an idle state, as the OP now has stated.

> So now we find out you are using the linux software raid to 
> do IDE based mirroring. Did you look into the preformance hit 
> you take when mirroring and worse when you eat the CPU with 
> this performance hit so you can write the data twice to the 
> IDE bus. Expect this will be a problem if the software raid 
> will give up itself when zapata asks for an interupt.
> If there is enough of these, and your system gets hung, your 
> going to have data loss to the journal and then to the rest 
> of the drives. Worse yet, if one drive had the updated info 
> and it couldn't write to the second drive, then you have 
> trouble concerning keeping them both in sync.  

Very much correct, thank you for pointing this out. However, for most setups
I deem this also an acceptable 'risk' since having a good way to keep going
even during disk failure is also valuable. Not so valueable as to go with
hardware raid though :-) I would sooner just add another box in failover
config.

Best regards,
Florian