NTFS “Compress this folder” for 3CX Call Recordings on a Live System | Performance / Risks

[CasL]

We're running 3CX on Windows in a VPS (Intel Xeon (Cascade Lake 4x vCPUs ~2.4 Ghz, 600 GB SSD). Our call recordings have grown to 550GB.

I've cleaned up what I can and tested NTFS compression ("Compress this folder to save disk space") since wav is uncompressed audio I tested on a subset by compressing 10GB of existings WAVs down to 8.3GB so a 17% reduction. Initial compression takes long (minutes) but is expected since our cpu doesn't really go above 30% usage for singular tasks even with increased priority.

Normally our live load during working hours can be ~50 active calls at once, and recordings are being written continuously.

Anybody who has tried using NTFS compression on the Recordings folder in a live 3CX Windows system?

A few things i'm wondering, is there any noticable impact on recording- playback or recording itself? Does windows scedule compression later if the system is bussy? Any other safer approaches?

 

[SteveITS]

I don’t have a direct answer about compression and 3CX. However another option would be to use the archiving feature to move them to another VM or any supported storage.

NTFS compression is real time so as the file is being saved, there’s no delay. IIRC when marking a folder compressed you can choose whether to compress its contents or not (right then).

 

[N_G]

Thats a bad idea. Recordings should be archived off instance. Enabling compression and thus delaying writing of recordings on a real time system with 50+ sim calls is a no no.

 

[VoIPTools]

You may want to take a look at our 3CX Recording Manager tool. We get 75% compression when we archive without any loss of audio quality.