[asterisk-users] Virtual machine timing (KVM)

[David Backeberg]

On Sun, Feb 21, 2010 at 10:04 PM, Sean Brady <sbrady at gtfservices.com> wrote:
> I do get choppy audio when playing recordings occasionally.  I haven’t had
> time to figure that one out, but I haven’t put it into production yet.

You just said you're getting unexplained choppiness.
You also just said you're not in production.

> I have been told repeatedly that Asterisk shouldn’t be virtualized, and that
> timing was an issue, however I have never been given a reason that I
> consider acceptable to preclude me from doing so.

How about the fact you're getting unexplained choppiness before you're
even in production?

> surrounding Asterisk virtualized.  Perhaps I am just stubborn, but I am
> determined to run Asterisk virtualized in production with conferencing (be
> it meetme or confbridge) until it’s been proven without doubt that it just
> doesn’t work.

What exactly would constitute 'proof without a doubt' that would satisfy you?

If your virtualized webserver has to fight it out with other virts,
and your webserver takes an extra second to process a web page, not
such a big deal. If that's your audio conference that just had to spin
for a second, you just lost words out of a sentence. If it happens
during authentication, you dropped digits and the auth fails. If it
happens during call setup, the call might not go through. If it
happens during hangup, the hangup might get missed. UDP does NOT
retransmit. Get it? Now do you understand why it's a bad idea?

Timers are built on the premise that they have access to either a real
timing device, or unobstructed access to a processor which clicks
through a proc cycle at a pre-determined rate. Once you break those
rules, don't be surprised when the timers stop working, and 'bad
things' happen.