randomly we get Playing 'conf-inv

[bobbymc]

we got about 188 agents on a single registration server and about 5 call servers. im not sure if there is a limitation on how many meetme rooms can exsists at once but i think we might have hit it. anyone knows what i should look at possibly?

[bobbymc]

when i ran meetme i see this output

* Total number of MeetMe users: 289


is it possible we are reaching a max amount of total users allowed in meetme?

[bobbymc]

btw our cpu is at 5%.. this is a 24 core server with 32 gigs of ram

[mflorell]

yes, it's possible, but we've never had a client with more than 100 agents on a single server before. Meetme has "blocking" operations that even though they happen extremely fast, prevent other meetmes from starting those same operations when they are still running. Because of this, the more meetmes you have on a single server, the slower they will be to react to commands, especially for outbound campaigns where agents go through calls rapidly. This is one of the reasons we significantly shortened the enter/leave sounds several years ago.

[bobbymc]

i know about the sound patch. did it make that much of a difference to replace the audio files with smaller audio?

[bobbymc]

how much performance increase did you guys get?

[mflorell]

We did that several years ago back when the dialers were single-core P4 servers. On servers with many agents it was a measurable improvement to replace the sound files, but I don't remember how much exactly.

[mcargile]

When you try to take an action on any particular MeetMe conference, MeetMe locks the data structure that holds all of the conferences, searches through the list for that conference, takes the action on that conference, then unlocks the conference list. This is so that two different threads do not modify the same conference at the same time resulting in either a crash or a deadlock. There are two major things that contribute to the load.

The first is how quickly Asterisk can find the conference. Prior to Asterisk 1.6, Asterisk used Linked Lists (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linked_list) for all of its core data structures. As such MeetMe could potentially have to search through every single conference till it found the right one. In 1.6 they switched to Hash Tables (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_table) which are considerably faster, but take up more memory. As such this lock in Asterisk 1.8 should be considerably faster.

The second is how long the action takes to process. Most actions are very fast, however playing those sounds was not. If I recall correctly shortening those sounds to 1/4 their size caused a 10% reduction in load on the system Matt was discussing.

Ultimately if you have that many agents on a single server you should definitely try 1.8 if you are not already, and make sure it has the enter.h and leave.h files replaced with our versions. The version of 1.8 from our download site already has these applied.

[superman7]

That several years ago back when the dialers were single-core P4 servers. On servers with many agents it was a measurable improvement to replace the sound files, but I don't remember how much exactly.