[Asterisk-Users] Something every TDMP user should know

[Colin Anderson]

 > They instantly got us to look at the output of zttest and we found that
this was (in their words) 'extremely low', with 'best' and  > 'worst'
readings of 99.975586% and 99.963379% respectively.  
 
Might want to give PCI latency setting a try, it helped for me. My ZTTEST
would drop occasionally to 99.95% until I set:
 
setpci -v -s 01:01.0 latency_timer=ff <--Digium PRI card
setpci -v -s 01:04:0 latency_timer=ff <--Digium 401 4 X FXS
setpci -v -s XX:XX:X latency_timer=0 <--1 entry for every other PCI card in
system from LSPCI output, modify XX:XX accordingly
 
Before setpci I would get best in ZTTEST at 99.987793% and worst ~ 99.95%
 
After setpci best is 100% and worst is 99.987793% consitient. 
 
I use SpanDSP to recieve faxes and before faxes were garbled and now they
are OK (BTW, now recieving ~150 faxes a day 99.95% OK, so SpanDSP *does*
work fine, you just have to set it up right. Ask me how.)
 
I put the setpci statements in /etc/rc.d/rc.local before my modprobes to the
Digium hardware and Asterisk startup. 
 
I'm using a 4-way Netfinity FC2 * 1.0 stable
 
I dunno, maybe the community is being too hard on Digium about the design of
the card. I can understand their perpective, it's brutal to make a card that
has to have such tight tolerances and make it work acceptably on the huge
variation in white box hardware (or black box, in your case). There's a page
on the Wiki about motherboards that work well with installation notes but
that's pointless since motherboards are such a moving target. Even the
motherboard vendor screwing around with BIOS updates can invalidate that
information. 
 
What I think is best for Asterisk implementation is for Digium to sell a
motherboard. No, seriously. Find a ECS or Abit or ASUS mobo that
consitiently yields 100% or 99.9999% and white-box it as a barebones kit
with a TXXX card. Sell it as a case, good PSU, mobo, and TXXX card - you add
your own RAM, NIC, CPU & HDD. Would you buy one for $699? I probably would.
It took me a couple of months of fooling around with my Netfinity before I
was pleased with the performance and satisfied that it would handle the
things I wanted it to do without choking. If I had the option of saving the
couple of months time obsessing over things like timing for $699, it would
have been a no brainer. Digium wins too, because they get an incremental
sale that they can make money on (margin on the mobo) and lower support
costs because they don't have to chase down IRQ latency phantoms. 
 
hth my 2c
 
 
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