[asterisk-dev] possible zaptel problem with SMP and RAID1

[Martin Vít]

Hi,

we have in production several SMP xeon and one core duo 2 servers always 
with sata sw RAID1

all xeon servers works well on digium 4xE1 with full loads

core 2 duo with asus server board using digium PCI 1xE1 were useless 
because it constantly
generates taps to the sound. On another board it works well. (we have 
tryed moving digium
into another PCI slots, no IRQ sharing etc...) Sangoma pci express 
solves this issue with the
same configuration.

I dont believe that RAID1 is causing this. If not sure, try to not write 
anything to the disk.


critch wrote:
> On Mon, 2007-07-09 at 18:23 +0200, François Delawarde wrote:
>   
>> Hi,
>>
>> I believe that it's a zaptel related problem, as I have the same 
>> problems trying with OpenVox hardware (A400 and OPVXA1200) and Digium 
>> hardware (I could test a TDM400P for a while, but I'm not a lucky owner 
>> yet), so it appears to be hardware independent. We also have same 
>> results on two standard motherboards, two different SMP CPU, different 
>> hard drives in RAID, ...
>>
>> I contacted OpenVox, they told us that it should be a software related 
>> problem. Also contacted Octasis, as the problem occured with their echo 
>> canceller and we first thought it was the reason, but they proved us 
>> wrong (telling that the "bips" were inserted before the echo canceller, 
>> maybe by zaptel modules). I then tested without echo canceler with same 
>> results.
>>     
>
> Your problem is "software" related. The zaptel cards require you
> actually get back round to read and handle the audio data regularly. You
> need to be able to let asterisk run in realtime so it can move these
> frames around.
>
> Your problem is going to be related to sysadmin work. You shouldn't run
> software raid on the machine doing asterisk. RAID1 just makes your life
> worse, you are being required by kernel level code to write everything
> to disk multiple times. Once for every disk in the RAID1. My guess is
> you have a SATA1 drive set, or possibly a poor SATA controller. When
> combined with software RAID you are getting hung up in some kernel code
> somewhere and by the time asterisk can service the channel again you
> have lost audio.
>
> Your test should be to write to the disk while you are listening to the
> channel, or recording it. Tuning the drive subsystem will reduce your
> problems. Removing software raid will further reduce your problems. A
> good overall system pruning and tweaking is in order.
>   


-- 
Martin Vít
LAM plus s.r.o.
http://www.lam.cz/
Tel.: 605 267 610

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