[Asterisk-Users] Missing audio from Zaptel channels - SOLVED!?

[Rod Bacon]

For those who are interested, the problem appears to NOT exist in 1.2Beta2.

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Rod Bacon
Empowered Communications
Ground Floor, 102 York St. South Melbourne
Victoria, Australia. 3205
Phone: +613 99401600    Fax: +613 99401650
FWD: 512237                   ICQ: 5662270
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Rod Bacon wrote:
> I have cross-posted this all over the place, and sent a copy directly to 
> digium
> support, in the hope of getting to the bottom of a problem that has me 
> pulling
> my hair out.
> 
> I currently have 2 production PSTN gateway servers, running asterisk 
> 1.2beta and
> TE406P cards (upgraded 405 cards, with hardware echo cancelers that we 
> recently
> purchased on recommendation). We went to the beta version after 
> installing the
> cancelers, as 1.0.9 kept segfaulting with the cancelers installed. Our PRIs
> terminate on a DMS100, at the same premises where our servers are 
> co-located.
> 
> Also in my farm, I have a dedicated IVR server, a VOIP gateway 
> (SIP/IAX/H.323)
> and clustered MySQL servers running as FastAGI servers, to remove 
> processor load
> from the PSTN servers. All servers are connected via gigabit Ethernet, and
> use IAX trunking for inter-server communications.
> 
> I have been through _everything_ possible to be sure that I don't have any
> zaptel timing/irq problems (framebuffer, apic, acpi, smp irq affinity, irq
> latency, etc. etc) and have good zttest results with no frame slips, 
> pops or clicks.
> 
> After my PSTN gateway servers have been running for a few hours, I 
> notice that
> some missing audio creeps into the start of each call (makes no 
> difference if
> the call is ZAP-ZAP native bridge or ZAP-IAX). At best, you miss the first
> syllable of the first word. At worst, you can miss the first 3 or 4 
> seconds of
> audio. Further investigation shows that asterisk is lagging after the 
> second leg
> of the call is answered (i.e. the time taken to bridge the channels gets 
> longer). If the resultant call is a Zaptel native bridge, then the 
> remaining audio is fine. If the resultant call is not zaptel natively 
> bridged (eg. call is routed via another server, or asterisk remains in 
> the media stream for another reason) then significant delay exists from 
> one end of the call to another (simply put, asterisk seems to slow down).
> 
> If I restart asterisk (even without removing and reloading zaptel 
> drivers), calls are OK again for a period (typically around 12 hours). A 
> workaround is to simply to install a cron job that periodically restarts 
> asterisk when it's idle,  but this is a less than ideal solution from my 
> perspective.
> 
> Something is definitely changing over time. A memory leak? Runaway 
> process? I
> really need help in trying to troubleshoot this, as I've run completely 
> out of
> both patience and ideas.
> 
>