vicidial.org

I wanted to share my experience with VICIDIAL in production on an Asterisk 1.4.10 server. The load was higher, there were problems with calls not being linked to the right agent that had information on their screen, recording filenames did not work properly, and the system crashed a couple times. Other than that it was good.

Testing went fine as far as most functions of VICIDIAL. The new features of Asterisk, like the DTMF-passthru for all channel-types in meetme also worked very well. The load and stability issues caused the experiment to end after only 2 days and the server is back on 1.2.23 and is running much more stable.

I tested vicidial with asterisk 1.4.6 and it was working OK (though it was a small call centre with only 4 agents)

The recording filename issue is down to how the callerid is handled (it's changed between 1.2 and 1.4).
To get the correct filenames, all you need to do is to change in extensions.conf this line:
exten => 8309,2,Monitor(wav,${CALLERIDNAME})
to this one
exten => 8309,2,Monitor(wav,${CALLERID(name)});

Thanks for that explanation of the recording issue, I think that's about the 4th time that has been changed since version 0.7

One more issue that is somewhat related to this is that I have wrotten a patch getting DTMF passthru to work under 1.2.23. I will post more about it in the support section.

Hi Matt,
I am wondering is there any possibilities to make vicidial stable with asterisk 1.4.
I am trying to install vicidial on embedded asterisk(which uses version 1.4).Its going to be for demo purpose since the embedded asterisk is in R&D phase.
Cheers,
Prabhakar

Hi Prabhakar

what i can suggest is, you need to try installing 1.4 on your requirement

and if you come across any problems, then post them to forum, you get lot of suggestions to how to over come that problem.

until unless we try we will not know what works for us.

its also good if you post your coments to Vicidial users .

ram

Hello everyone!

I was just wondering if anyone has any more experiences in vicidial in a 1.4 asterisk installation? It is mid 2007... and buzz is being made about 1.6. I think it won't be long before 1.2 is not updated anymore.

Any news on this?


Alejandro

As of 1.2.24 (released Aug 7) the 1.2 branch will only be maintained with security fix releases.

I'm deploying vicidial with asterisk 1.4.11 in ~2 weeks time. I'll share my experiences, but I have been testing during the last couple of weeks and it seems to be fine. (couple of things need to be tweaked, but that's all)

Thank you, any info on this would be greatly appreciated, I cannot do much testing right now since my only vicidial server is in production and i don't have any equipment available.


Thank you,


Alejandro

So I have finshed deploying vicidial with asterisk 1.4.11. The system went live 2 weeks ago.

My server hardware:
Athlon X2 5600+
4Gb memory
2x400G SATA2 HDs in RAID0 for the recordings
Digium TE120P connected to an E1 with 12 channels
CentOS5 with lates patches
~15 campaigns, all calls recorded

Agent side:
Low-cost linux PCs running Fedora 7
Bugetone BT-200 SIP phones

The first day of operation went fine, but we had only 3-4 agents logged on at any time. Average load was between 1 and 2, rarely spiking above 2.

The second day we had full house (7 agents). Now this was the time when problems started to appear. Average load went above 2 with spikes up to 4+. Asterisk crashed. And crashed again after 20 mins... To reduce load I switched off the recording conversion (now the recordings are converted to mp3 during the night). We worked with 6 agents for the rest of the day.

During the second night I made some changes. To reduce load I set up a 500M RAM drive for the recordings and a cronjob to move all these recordings to HD every 1 hour. Got 7 agents onto the system and everything went just fine. Average load stayed below 2 and didn't have any problems since the introduction of the RAM drive.

Couple of more points about this specific install.
- this server is used by the rest of the office (~12 SIP extensions inbound/outbound calls)
- eaccelerator is not installed yet (as php version is 5.1.x and eaccelerator is only beta for php 5.1)

So the next thing will be to either move the webserver or the db server onto a different machine, so more agents could use the system (though this is not a priority yet as since the introduction of vicidial agent productivity went through the root! )

If anybody has any questions just ask!

@peacy
you don't have any issues with asterisk 1.4.11 aside from the server load?

i'm wondering why you have such a high load running w/ less than 10 agents. let me compare my setup.

hardware:
amd x2 4400
3 gig ram
80 gig sata hd
x100p card
2 lan card

this is a single server setup handling 15 agents w/ full recordings and using g729 codec. i'm using mixmonitor for call recordings and also have a script running every 10 minutes to upload the recordings to a file server. i'm using 1 gig of ramdrive so that the bottlenecks associated w/ full recordings are elimated.

i also have a multi-server setup running on the same hardware except for the apache/database server w/c is just a regular core duo w/ 1 gig of ram. i am running 30 agents on the vicidial server. average load on the vicidial server is almost 100%. it can still accomodate more than 15 agents since it's just using 50% of its cpu resources.

@gardo

Do you have eaccelerator installed? (it supposed to grealy reduce the load)
When i was talking about load i meant unix load not cpu utilization %.
The cpu utilization is between 20-50% (average across the two cores).

The only tweak I had to make was regarding the recording filenames (see earlier).
I also noticed that the _out files created by Monitor are only 44 bytes and all of the recorded content is in the _in file. (This could be a 1.4.x specific "feature".) Oh well, I don't need to mix them....

Yesterday evening I downgraded asterisk from 1.4.11 to 1.2.24. The main reason was the load on the system. With 5 agents the 15 min load average was ~1.6. From time to time, asterisk was using 105%+ CPU.

Now back to 1.2.24, everything is much smoother. Same number of agents on the system and the 15 min load average is below 0.5!!!

Hi

thanks for the input
its really good suggestions for other users who want to sue 1.4.X

ram