[Asterisk-Users] Bad Bad Performance; Max 20 Calls on Quad Proc?

[Matthew Boehm]

Here is the setup: Dell 6250, Quad Proc P3 500Mhz. Digium Single Span T1 
card. System has 71 sip peers/users. All calls are G729; we have 10 
licenses. All calls follow this path: UA -> Asterisk -> Digium PRI -> 
Class4/5 switch. The switch dictates if it should go out local PRI for 
local termination or out PRI to our Cisco AS5300 for LD termination.

Our biggest problem is echo. Sometimes there is none, sometimes there is 
A LOT, sometimes there is a little. Sometimes it happens on local 
PRI->PRI calls, sometimes it happens on Voip->voip calls.

I've been watching 'top' again.  I witnessed the CPU usage on Asterisk 
jump to and stay at 47% with 4 calls up. Then it fell back to 1% with 
those same 4 calls about 10 seconds later.

I'm very dissapointed in this. Is this what I can expect? I still can't 
grasp why asterisk is not using the other 3 processors to better its 
performance.

But then again, reading Digium's new benchmarks for their new card this 
sorta fits. They benched a dual 3Ghz Xeon and got 120 G729->PRI calls.

Another thing is "QUALIFY" problems.  All our SIP users are on T1's that 
are directly connected to our network. All our customers' T1 come 
straight to our Cisco 7206. Our asterisk box is on a Catalyst switch 
also connected to the router. All but 15 of the 71 peers we have, have 
qualify turned on; Mostly because I need the NAT keep-alive. All day 
long I will get "Too Lagged" or "Unreachable" on UAs then several 
seconds later they come back. Could this be overloading cpu? Seems this 
could be put onto another proc.

Some of that is rant; some is pure concern.  Is anyone else experiencing 
similiar stuff?

-Matthew