[Freeswitch-users] FreeSWITCH and SOHO systems / HPET timers

[Ognjen Seslija]

5.6 has 1000HZ set and so do 5.4 and 5.5 on my machines.

On Fri, May 6, 2011 at 3:30 PM, Brett Maxfield <
brett.maxfield+freeswitch at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi List,
>
> I have been looking for a small SOHO software switch to manage one or two
> phone extensions to initially one upstream SIP provider.
>
> I have installed the demo/example system on a few pieces of hardware which
> while are not high end, nevertheless are OK considering the very small
> capacity required for a SOHO system, and me wanting to reserve my better
> hardware for more high end loads. The embedded fanless system i have runs
> ok, but the voice for the test IVR is very choppy, and the same choppy
> result on a atom dual core net-top (both centos 5.6). I understand that
> tuning is a complex issue on a non-RT system such as Linux, and so
> FreeSWITCH is probably only tuned for high end systems. This choppiness,
> specifically on low end systems, is "mentioned" in previous list discussions
> as being a timer granularity issue with the kernel.
>
> I've had some googling around and it seems that the newest centos version
> supported by FreeSWITCH is CentOS 5.3, perhaps due to issues with timer
> resolution in newer kernels. The stock kernel for 5.4 and 5.5 does not
> appear to have a 1000Hz kernel, from what i can see, and xen stock kernels
> that i have seen have 250Hz, which is different again, and would also be a
> problem for FreeSWITCH running in a xen guest.
>
> So my question is, given the contentious issue this seems to have been in
> the past, should i even bother trying/using FreeSWITCH for these sorts of
> SOHO / low end systems ?
>
> Is there any plan to make FreeSWITCH tunable (in a non-default way) for low
> end SOHO systems, which might have a typical 3-4 (say 10 at max)
> connections, rather than being tuned for 100's or even 1000's of connections
> by default.
>
> From what i have seen i quite like FreeSWITCH, and would like to run it for
> both SOHO and learning purposes.
>
> I note that centos 5.6 does not explicitly mention CONFIG_HZ_* anymore in
> the kernel config (/boot/config-2.6.18-238.9.1.el5.centos.plus), but it does
> appear to have support for HPET :
>
> CONFIG_HPET_TIMER=y
> CONFIG_HPET_EMULATE_RTC=y
> CONFIG_TICK_DIVIDER=y
>
> There was talk of high resolution timer patches for kernel 2.6.17, and hpet
> timers seem to be present in the 2.6.18 kernel, at least in centos 5.6 above
> (i have not checked previous versions).
>
> Given the increasing availability of HPET timers in newer kernels, could
> features such as nanosleep() and HPET timers be used to avoid the problems
> with the kernel's timer granularity / HZ issues ?
>
> Cheers
> Brett
>
>
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