[asterisk-users] asterisk 1.8 on Solaris/sparc

[A J Stiles]

On Wednesday 18 July 2012, Jeremy Kister wrote:
> I've got the latest asterisk 1.8 running on a Netra X1 with Solaris 10 u10.
> 
> The system itself is happy and phone calls (between two parties) seem fine.
> 
> Unfortunately, when a caller listens to a Playback recording, there
> seems to be moments of stutter - perhaps 1 second of stutter for every
> 10 seconds of Playback.  The stutter is not consistent at the same point
> of the playback file.

It sounds as though you may have run into an obscure issue with the default 
filesystems of Solaris and Linux having diametrically-opposed design 
philosophies with regard to caching policy.

The following is a bit of an over-simplification, but here goes anyway.  
Solaris is built for robustness:  it doesn't even return from a write to disk 
until it has verified that the data was written successfully.

Linux is built for speed:  it caches everything it possibly can, serves reads 
straight from cache and never commits anything to disk unless it's about to 
run out of RAM or a shutdown is requested.

If you write a program that uses temporary files a lot, you can test on Linux 
on a scrapper and find it blisteringly fast -- only for it to slow to a crawl 
when you deploy on Solaris.  This is because under Linux, short-term temporary 
files can be written to cache, read from cache and deleted from cache, all 
without ever seeing oxide -- but Solaris, unless instructed otherwise, will 
insist to write the whole lot to disk anyway.

If this is what's causing your problems, you will have to do some low-level 
tweaking.  But it *is* fixable.

-- 
AJS
Price Engines Ltd.  DDI: 01283 707058.

-- 
AJS

Answers come *after* questions.