We have been using PBXact for over two years now and the first year was smooth sailing. Once the pandemic started and most users started relying on Zulu from home that is when the problems started. The main problem we have is Zulu losing registration on Asterisk. The zulu desktop client will connect at first but after a while it will stop receiving calls and just display a message “Softphone Reconnecting…”. At this point the only solution is to close the program and restart it for it to work again. Some clients have this problem many times a day now.
Sangoma support has been totally useless and does not know how to solve the problem. They have downloaded log files from the server and from the clients and cannot find a reason for the disconnects. Their last statement simply said that Zulu should only be used by 30 to 40% of the users and not by everyone. That came after spending over 400 USD on support. We have around 200 users on Zulu on a 400 user server. Once we shifted from desk phones to Zulu we had to upgrade system RAM from 8gb to 16gb because we were seeing high loads but still have the same problems.
We have never used so many Zulu users at once. Do you have the issue on (local) and off (VPN) site? Could this coincide with a failed lease renewal? Wondering if it is happening on the network/switch side? Is there anything in the Zulu client logs about the registration failures?
We are having two issues lately. The first is the zulu client disconnecting and not reconnecting on its own. The other one is more problematic, when we have high traffic on the server (over 40 active calls) we can see CPU utilization spike to over 40 for a few minutes and all calls get disconnected. After a while CPU drops down to normal (less than 1) and the server resumes operations. This happens a couple times a week and disrupts users.
The original server was a PBXact appliance rated for 400 users (i5 cpu with 8gb of RAM) which was replaced because it was suddenly rebooting on its own). The new server is a quad core Xeon with 16gb of RAM. It does not reboot but high call volumes will disrupt service. The hardware should support over 100 simultaneous calls according to specs. Apparently Zulu takes too many resources for even this server.