Record application reliability

Asterisk Asterisk Support
1

I am evaluating Asterisk to implement my Voice Recording application using SIP VoIP that should scale up to 200 simultaneous calls.
In my tests I observed that the the Asterisk fails recording some calls, especially when the load increases: with 100 calls I found an error probability of about 60-80% while with 10 calls it is about 0-20%. I tried to use different codecs but the results are quite the same, only using the low bit rate codecs like G.723 I reduced the errors to 30% when 100 calls were running.
I measured the errors in terms of recording file created on the hard disk.

The voice menu I used to start recording is the following:
[voicemenu-custom-2]
comment = recordingmenu
alias_exten =
exten = s,1,Answer
exten = s,n,ChanIsAvail(SIP/bridge)
exten = s,n,Read(${AVAILCHAN})
exten = s,n,Set(nchan=${CUT(AVAILCHAN,/,2-)})
exten = s,n,Set(filename=“recordings/from-”${nchan})
exten = s,n,Record(${filename}:g723)

Are there any errors in the voice menu?
Have you ever seen such a problem?

My Asterisk configuration is: Desktop PC, 3.2 GHz Pentium 4 processor, 1 GByte RAM, SATA hard disk, 100 Mbit Ethernet.

Do you think I need a more powerful hardware to support my requirements?

All the calls are always answered, only record seems to fail.

Thanks in advance.

Mirco

2

Mirco,

Try setting the filename to be on a ramdisk partition. I experienced this type of issue myself and found many problems when trying to record so many calls to a hard disk at one time.

Just make sure you have a cleanup script to remove the recording from the ramdisk once the recording is complete.

-Jarrod

3

consider using a separate server dedicated to call recording and let the switch send all traffic thru that port. I would not perform call recording on a production server with that many calls. Depends too if you’re doing other things such as G.729 encoding or heavy IVR menus putting a load on asterisk, its safer to offload this process.

Look at software like oreka (orecx for the commercial gui package and g729 support). We demo’d it and loved it.

4

May thanks.

Supertle, do you think it will be possible running Asterisk and Oreka on the same server during development phase when the performance are not important?

Mirco