[asterisk-users] long return times from System() calls with 1.6.2.6?

[David Backeberg]

I've just upgraded to 1.6.2.6 on one of my test systems. I started out
happy, with some improvements in transfers to Local() channels from a
SIP channel, and much nicer verbose fax handling.

However, something is really weird when I need to do System() calls.
It was really, really weird. This was also affecting AGI, when I
needed to read system variables from asterisk into an AGI Perl script.

I have a second test system, with asterisk-1.6.2.6, and there are not
these problems with that system.

So I suspect something whacky that really probably has nothing to do
with asterisk.

It almost feels like delay in reading loopback, or running out of
available files on the system, or something like that. I'm rebooted,
and the problem did not go away.

I'm doing really, really innocent things, like:

exten => s,1,Verbose(EXTENSION is: ${EXTEN})
exten => s,n,Set(MESSAGE_PATH=/path/to/message/)
exten => s,n,System(test -e ${MESSAGE_PATH}${EXTEN})
exten => s,n,Verbose(System call result was ${SYSTEMSTATUS})
exten => s,n,ExecIf($[${SYSTEMSTATUS} = SUCCESS]?Playback(${OVERFLOW_GENERIC}))
exten => s,n,ExecIf($[${SYSTEMSTATUS} = SUCCESS]?HangUp())
exten => s,n,Goto(Next_context,s,1)

That runs lightning-fast on every system, but not on this one. There
is a huge pause, like two seconds, waiting for the System() call to
return. Dead air is not cool when setting up messaging on a phone
system.

Ideas?