Amfeltec Timers

[kashinc]

Hello,

I have two clusters running on Vicibox 11 install. I noticed that PCI express timing cards are being detected but not loaded. Are the timing cards not required anymore?

-Kashinc

[roger.milligan]

Hello

We have been installing ViciBox 11 without any timing devices and have installed 2 clusters - one a 500 agent on Dell R450 servers. Done this for 2 reasons - a) we've been finding that having or not having timers did not seem to make any difference in audio quality; and b) because the VoiceSync driver support for OpenSUSE 15.5 is still not in place. If you look at https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/vicidial/openSUSE_Leap_15.5/x86_64/ you will see that they are not there, whereas they are in the previous versions. I have tried, unsuccessfully, to find out when this will happen, but have not been able to find out who does this or what their timing is. This would be why you are not seeing them working.

That said, this week we've hit an interesting problem on a 3rd install (a 480 agent cluster build) where we are using a set of pretty old servers (Dell R710's at least 8 years old) and we're getting a whole lot of bad audio (one-sided or bad quality) on the IAX2 trunk calls. Where the agents is on the same server as the outbound call was made, or the inbound call came in on then the audio is fine, however, when the call is transferred to an agent on another server (via IAX2 trunk), we get those issues. We're looking for other reasons for this, but it may well be that this older hardware really needs the timers, whereas the newer ones don't. Would really value any ideas from others on this.

Regards

Roger

[carpenox]

Those are some pretty big clusters, how many servers in the one having issues? You'd be surprised the difference in performance from leap to a red hat distro like Alma or Rocky make. Like 3-400% difference. I'm wondering if it's performance issues with the older hardware, I've seen it with hetzner servers lately.

[roger.milligan]

Hello Chris. We have 5 x Dell R710s in that cluster. Getting the audio issues with the first campaign to go live with only 20 agents spread across the 5! So not a capacity issue. For many years I've been asking "What does it sound like when you get MeetMe timing issues?" and have never been able to find an answer. I've always expected there to be a slight delay in the voice and for the two sides to be a bit out of sync, but maybe this one-sided audio and >2 second delays is how it manifests??

[okli]

Hello
...
That said, this week we've hit an interesting problem on a 3rd install (a 480 agent cluster build) where we are using a set of pretty old servers (Dell R710's at least 8 years old) and we're getting a whole lot of bad audio (one-sided or bad quality) on the IAX2 trunk calls. Where the agents is on the same server as the outbound call was made, or the inbound call came in on then the audio is fine, however, when the call is transferred to an agent on another server (via IAX2 trunk), we get those issues. We're looking for other reasons for this, but it may well be that this older hardware really needs the timers, whereas the newer ones don't. Would really value any ideas from others on this.

Regards

Roger

We had same issues event with a single agent on relatively new hardware- Dell R640 with Amfeltec timer cards. After a lot of troubleshooting it turned out we had to enable jitter buffer on IAX to solve it, just used same settings as the asterisk 1.4 config. Same happened on several other clusters with different hardware, all using timer cards.
Still a mystery why it was needed for servers on same switches in same location and network.
viewtopic.php?p=151084#p151084

[carpenox]

Great postback