[asterisk-users] Asterisk might be dropping RTP packets before reaching eth int?

[Jonathan Miller]

We put a 3c509 in, just for posterity, and it did not help the issue.
I verified that the NIC is not sharing any interrupts, that there is
no excessive disk wait, and that asterisk thinks it is sending the
packets. They are simply not making it to the physical interface.

Is there somewhere else I can look or something else I can do? How
would I go about prioritizing the asterisk process? There's not a lot
of processes running besides asterisk itself, dhcpd, tftpd and
postfix. Really just kernel stuff after that...

This is killing me. Voice drops out for various periods (between 1/2
and 5 seconds) and lost packets do not show up with a rtp rtcp
stats...

This is weird. Any help you can offer would be appreciated. We spent 6
hours on phone with Digium support yesterday and could not locate an
issue within asterisk itself.

-Jonathan


On Wed, Aug 13, 2008 at 9:08 PM, Steve Totaro
<stotaro at totarotechnologies.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 13, 2008 at 7:40 PM, Jonathan Miller <iamfromit at gmail.com> wrote:
>> From what I can determine while troubleshooting a voice-dropping
>> issue, the Asterisk server in my organization has been dropping RTP
>> packets between the asterisk server process and the network interface.
>>
>> I determined this from an RTP debug that showed packets sent to the
>> phone and packets received from the phone during the entire call. A
>> tcpdump done on the server for the interface that would deliver the
>> packet to the wire does not show the packets.
>>
>> Is there somewhere I can look to resolve this? Something anybody has
>> come across? It is happening frequently and with great discomfort to
>> many users.
>>
>> I had upgraded from 1.2.x to latest 1.4.x in attempts to resolve this.
>> I also disabled a lot of COM/LPT and USB devices in the BIOS to free
>> up some IRQ's. no devices are sharing IRQ's at this point, with I
>> thought might have been part of the issue, but has proved to at least
>> not be directly related.
>>
>> These calls are from a PRI to a Cisco 7940 using SIP. There is a
>> Juniper EX switch between the two. Both sides negotiate at
>> 100Mbps/Full Duplex.
>>
>> I have ruled the switch out of the problem as it's not seeing the
>> packets on the wire when the issue is occuring.
>>
>> Please help or point me to someone that can.
>>
>> -Jonathan
>> iamfromit at gmail.com
>
> Jonathan,
>
> It sounds hardware specific to me.  Is this a new install or a new problem?
>
> If it is a new problem, then what has changed?  Is the NIC in question
> onboard?  What hardware are you using?  Brands, MoBo, NIC, etc...
>
> If I were you, I would remove or disable the NIC and stick a tried and
> true old school 3Com NIC in the server and try that.
>
> Thanks,
> Steve Totaro
>
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