[asterisk-users] Short Audio Drop Out During Calls

[Jared Smith]

On Wed, 2007-09-19 at 13:11 -0500, Brent Torrenga wrote:
> Running 1.4.11, and during an established SIP call, we often get audio drop
> outs if another call comes in.  

This is usually an indication of some type network problem.  The first
step is to figure out *why* the audio sounds bad.  I suggest you fire up
a packet sniffer like Wireshark and look for network jitter, dropped
packets, or out-of-order packets.  Luckily, Wireshark has some great RTP
analysis tools, and it's usually pretty simple to identify the culprit.

Once you've figured out what the problem is (dropped packets, jitter,
etc.) then you can work from that towards the cause of the problem.  For
example, are your switches overloaded?  Are you network cards connecting
to the switch at full duplex?  Are there bandwidth bottlenecks along the
way?

The other thing I'd watch is to see if the audio drops correspond to CPU
spikes on the server.  This is probably the second most common cause.
Hopefully I've given you enought to get started in tracking down your
problem.  If not, let me know and I'll go into more detail.


-- 
Jared Smith
Community Relations Manager
Digium, Inc.