High CPU usage on Asterisk 16

[RBecker]

Hey all,
Just set up a new cluster a couple weeks ago and have been having issues with CPU usage/load once the system gets busy. I have three agent servers, scratch install on AlmaLinux 8.9, with Asterisk 16.30.1-vici, chan_sip, MeetMe, and on SVN 3805. They are VMs with 8GB RAM and 16 vCPU. Campaigns are dialing on Ratio with dial levels between 5-8, AMD is on, and all agents are using ViciPhone. Once one of the servers has about 10 agents and 90-110 channels on it, Asterisk's CPU usage tends to spike up repeatedly and stay high, sometimes causing load of 10-20 or more for brief periods. Once a few agents sign out and channel counts drop back down, the system performs fine again. This high load is causing choppy audio and some delays on 3-way/transfer calls. Wondering if there's anything specific I need to be doing for Asterisk 16 that might help alleviate this. Interestingly, I noticed that the install.pl script does not load a modules.conf for Asterisk. I copied one over from one of my ViciBox systems with Ast 13, and that seemed to calm load down significantly with less agents signed on.

As a point of reference, I have a much larger cluster running a mix of ViciBox 9 and 10, all on Asterisk 13, and I'm not seeing the same issues under similar agent counts.

[carpenox]

Its the VM, stay away from them altogether