Load

[rambo]

Hello every one,

We are running 20 agents on at a 1.7 auto dial. we have a zhone channel bank with a Digium E1 Card. We are using the the G729 codec and doing recordings on demand.
One box is for the dialer just to make the calls and do the recordings, that server is a 2.8 Xeon, 4gb of Ram, 200GB Sata.
One box is for the mysql and http, that server is a AMD dual core, 1GB of Ram, 200GB IED.

By the way Matt, I talked to you about some problems we were having with our channel bank and Digium card, once we switched to a high end server there was no more problems, thanks for your help.

The question I have is about the load, what is the danger zone and how come some times the load will be at 3 and some times it will jump to 6. How come it will jump from the 3 to 6, is it because the agents are in a call, not in a call and more lines are dialing out or because some agents are recordings?

We are going to be setting up a Box for just recordings, so we will be able to record all the calls soon.

[mflorell]

Asterisk does cause load spikes on busy systems for some reason, I've seen it even on busy non-VICIDIAL Asterisk servers and it can double the load for short periods of time. Those spikes can sometimes cause pauses in recording audio. In general we have not had too many issues with the spikes, but it is best to keep the loadavg at lower than 100% of the CPU(1.0 on single processor, 2.0 for HT P4 processor, etc...)

If you want to record all calls I would strongly suggest going with a SCSI RAID using a SCSI RAID card(we use the LSI Logic 320-1) on that server. Also, I would recommend not recording ore than 50 calls at once if you want not recording issues.

If you are adding one new server you may want to turn your existing Asterisk/VICIDIAL server into a codec transcoding server and then turn your new server(that you will do recordings on) into the new Asterisk VICIDIAL server because a great portion of the load on your existing setup is converting the G729 to ULAW when the call connects to agents.

[rambo]

Hello Matt,

Thanks for the info, everything is looking good. I will get two SCSI in the new server we are getting and from what you are saying it would be safe to say that it looks like I'm going to have to get another server to lower the load.