[Asterisk-Users] Asterisk 1.0.9 long term stability <--thread hijack, why not reboot?

[Andrew Kohlsmith]

On Thursday 15 September 2005 11:38, Paul wrote:
> They designed it to be shut down. I guess that means it doesn't  just
> roll over like a dead cow.

Actually dead cows aren't back-heavy.  They typically just keep whatever 
position they were in when they took their last breath, much like the telco 
crosspoint switches.  :-)

> You wouldn't design a crane controller so that it releases the load on
> reboot and then tries to return the cable to the pre-reboot position.
> The same principle applies here. If it's mission-critical, you might
> have to spend more on the hardware. A good example would be crosspoint

I agree -- You need to spend more time on both hardware and software.  For me, 
a phone system is like a file server or network switch -- it is *not* meant 
to be rebooted.  If it needs to be periodically power-cycled then address the 
problem, don't simply put a cron script in.

> I did hardware and software design for some devices that were usually
> placed in very remote areas(underwater, mountains, arctic are a few). We
> used a very low power clock device that would boot the cpu up. We did
> whatever needed to be done, set the clock registers for the next wakeup
> and shut down again. There were other ways to approach the problem, but
> this approach made coding easier, used less power and allowed us to get
> more functionality without increasing rom or ram size. If you only

How did it save you ROM/RAM?  I can see it saving having to put fancy power 
controller code and hardware in... Is that what you meant?

> needed to take one simple measurement and store it to the ram, you could
> do a boot/run/shutoff every second and still achieve some additional
> battery runtime.

Agreed but again -- you designed for this specific purpose.  Asterisk isn't 
meant to boot up, answer the phone, process the call and shut down again 
until the next ring.  (This would be an interesting approach to power savings 
though if your system boot time was fast enough and call volumes varied 
enough to make it worthwhile.)

-A.