[Asterisk-Users] four wildcards in a single pc

[Shoval Tomer]

Rich, thank you so much for taking the time to patiently explain the
issue.

I think this ought to be on the wiki for future newbies.

Thanks.


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Rich Adamson [mailto:radamson at routers.com]
> Sent: Thursday, December 09, 2004 5:39 PM
> To: Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion
> Subject: Re: [Asterisk-Users] four wildcards in a single pc
> 
> > I have installed successfully more then four cards in a machine
before.
> > I had a firewall with eight network interfaces (one quad card, one
duo
> > and two singles)
> > I have machines with two dialogic boards, a pci display card, and a
> > network interface.
> > And I know I've had machines at home that had a display adaptor,
modem,
> > network, scsi, and soundblaster all together.
> >
> > Yet, people claim it won't work because of lack of IRQs, and that
it's
> > not related to Digium.
> >
> > What am I missing?
> 
> There has been a lot of comments over the last 12 months or so
relative
> on this. The issue is _not_ the number of interrupts, but rather the
> ability of those interrupts to handle the flow of data across the bus
> _without_ injecting delay. That ability seems to be directly related
> to exactly how the interrupts are handled on _each_ motherboard, and
> seems to have some relationship to the pci support chips on the
> motherboard.
> 
> There are plenty of implementations that _do_ share interrupts with
> absolutely no problems, and at least some of those are represented to
> be rather heavily loaded.
> 
> There's also been a fair number of people that have had problems with
> the latest/fanciest/fastest system, and swapping out the motherboard
> with a 800 mhz P3 fixed their issues. What else actually changed
> during that swap? No one knows for sure, but supposedly nothing.
> 
> The current list of symptoms/issues reads something like this:
> - processor speed has little/nothing to do with it
> - dual vs single processors has nothing to do with it
> - amount of ram, etc, has nothing to do with it
> - the linux distro in use has nothing to do with
> - digium cards expect a solid 1000 interrupts/second/card with no
>   interrupt service latency
> - those heavily involved with audio (not voip audio) have known about
>   pci & interrupt latency issues with certain motherboards. They seem
>   to be more sensitive to the issues then * is. No one has found
>   a list of what _they_ consider to be bad boards.
> - there is no consolidated list of what motherboards work vs don't
>   partially due to the difficulty of describing boards from vendors
>   (eg, Dell, HP), and in some cases, different boards used in the
>   same model number of system.
> - if a particular motherboard has an issue, the problem typically
>   appears as echo on pstn calls (one direction only)
> - there are no tools that anyone has written/found to help identify
>   which systems/motherboards have issues
> - although some people represent that digium support is working on
>   something, those words have been heard before and the problems
>   still exist (at least for some).
> 
> So, it seems the only _reliable_ answer to your question is to try it
> on whatever hardware you have available.
> 
> 
> 
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