[asterisk-users] Monitor application inestability and high load

[Gordon Henderson]

On Tue, 29 May 2007, Edgar A. Luna Diaz wrote:

> The real problem was found. The configuration of this server had a
> recording path as /var/spool/asterisk/monitor/ for every call, so the
> size of monitor (the directory) keeps growing at 2000 files per day. Its
> peek was around 36MB, just containing the addresses of the files, I just
> changed the filename variable for Monitor to store in a path like
> /var/spool/asterisk/monitor/2007/05/29/. With this change the maximum
> size of a directory is 700k.

That's a common problem with many filesystems - there is a limit to the 
number of files it's "sensible" to put in one directory - it's really a 
SysAdmin issue, but it's going to be easy for others to enter this trap.

It really does depend on the filesystem though - Linux ext3 is fair to 
middling at handling large numbers of files - with the dir_index option 
set, but without it, it's really bad. There are other filesystems which 
are better (and worse!) Ext3 has an option at create time - dir_index 
which you can set to make it use a more efficient way to store filenames. 
It's usually too late to change at production time unless you can take the 
server offline for a bit. (The defaults also depend on your Linux 
distribution too!)

Your system of a new directory per day is a solution similar to many 
others adopted by other systems though! (eg. email spools, home 
directorys, squid cache files, etc.)

Gordon