Dialparties.agi hanging

General Help
1

Hello FreePBX Community,
I am using an updated version of Elastix 1.4 with Freepbx 2.5.2.2. I have a queue setup for incoming calls and I have about 40 static agents in the queue. About once everyday some of the phones in the queue stop ringing and i usually have to do a restart to fix it. Sometimes I can just go into freepbx and hit the orange apply configuration changes and everything loads up fine. So looking around I do a “top” and I see 3 dialparties.agi processes at 99.9% CPU and with time greater than 24:00.00.

Googling the issue I reach a thread on this forum but going through it looked like it was fixed sometime last year (Aug 09) but for some reason I believe I am facing the same issue or am I not allowed to have 40 users in a queue.

BTW the server is a quad-xeon with 4GB ram.

Thanks

2

There have been a lot of configurable changes since 2.5 wrt to queues. Have a look at the following article I wrote a couple weeks ago:

http://www.freepbx.org/news/2010-02-26/heavy-queue-usage-in-freepbx

3

garfield81, there are many known situations like the one you described. The later versions of FreePBX provide better support and prevention, and specifically to dialparties.agi related issues. You might want to look in to upgrading to the latest version of FreePBX. Also, have a look at this blog post for other way to reduce “drag” on your system:

http://www.freepbx.org/news/2010-02-26/heavy-queue-usage-in-freepbx

4

p_lindheimer & lazytt,
thank you for the reply and the development of an awesome software. So in your opinion should I just upgrade FreePBX on my elastix box which is running asterisk 1.4 or should I set up a new box with barebones asterisk 1.6 on CentOS and install FreePBX onto it.

Thank You

5

Personally, I’m running asteriskNow with 1.6 on it.

6

garfield,

I’m not in a position to say whether you should run with 1.4 or 1.6 other than to say that one of the important patches available in the referenced article is for 1.4 as it has not been ported to 1.6 as of yet.

7

Thanks for your replies. I have read through the article a couple of times just to wrap my head around it but I am a little confused regarding the patches. Please correct me if I am wrong.

1.) There is a port for 1.4 for DEVSTATE()
2.) There is another port for 1.4 for EXTSTATE()
3.) There is a patch for 1.4 that “add the “device” state” of HINT:nnn@context as a way to associate a hint vs. a real device"

As I have mentioned I am having a hard time figuring out the back ports and patches so I was wondering how much improvement would I see if I set Skip Busy Agents to “Yes + (ringinuse=no)”.

Also could you point me to a howto on installing the patch and the backports for DEVSTATE() and EXTSTATE().

Thanks and I apologize if I didn’t make sense.

8

garfield81,

diagnosing busy queue issues can be quite complex as the queue system in Asterisk is one of the more complex applications and is ridden with issues and known (and unknown) problems.

If the article leaves your head “swimming” and you are not familiar with patching the Asterisk source, you are far from alone. You may want to consider getting some professional help either from the FreePBX services team or other competent sources of your choosing to help and try to diagnose your issues as well as recommend and help deploy the best solution to try and address your issues.

I realize it’s probably not the answer you were hoping for but when it comes to patching and recompiling the source as well as diagnosing such issues, it’s not something that comes with quick forum answers unfortunately.

9

Philippe,
I am going to be buying paid support and was just wondering if I could get you to help us since we have been going back and forth and you are already familiar with our issue.

Thanks