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Poor audio, dropped calls and my solution

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instantexpert

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We've been using 3CX since fall of 2009 and have been through all of the revisions since then. Throughout this time there had been many little issues that were waiting for a fix. With the exception of MOH improvements, these have been pretty much resolved in 8.1. However, we've always had some call quality issues and with the latest 3 releases, we were experiencing dropped inbound calls.

I nearly tore my hair out trying to reproduce the dropped call issues so I could submit a support request and with everything from VOIP provider to internet service to the local PBX being possible culprits I didn't know where to look. Most of my users suffered in silence with really poor call quality since late last fall. It wasn't until after I resolved things that many of them came up to me and said that they were using their cell phones rather than our 3CX system!

Last week, my boss complained of poor voicemail prompt quality which was my first definitive proof that the problem was in my 3CX box. I started investigating and noticed that processor usage was a bit high at around 80%. This turned out to be due to the antivirus performing a quick scan after updating its definitions. After this realization of potential performance issues, I made several changes that dramatically improved the call quality and has users much happier with the system.

-Disabled protocol scanning (http, etc) on my antivirus scanner
-Turned on scan after update and replaced with a scan at midnight
-Turned off Windows Firewall (huge benefit)
-Enabled virtualization in the BIOS (we are running under VMWare server as the only guest OS on a linux server)

So, basically, I looked for anything that might be interfering with network performance and turned it off followed by finding any other general performance improvements.

For reference, my system is as follows

-2GHz Xeon dual core, 8GB memory
-Cent OS host operating system purely to host the phone virtual machine
-VMWare server 2.0
-Windows Server 2008x32 (we originally used x64 but it was problematic) guest OS with 2 processors and 6GB of memory allocated

It's easy to see why I didn't consider performance an issue with this VM setup with way more resources than I would have thought necessary.

I hope this helps somebody.

Leon
 
Hi Leon,

Just out of interest, what AV are you using?

Thanks

Paul
 
Paul,

I'm using ESET Nod32.

Leon
 
Matt,

I'd never be crazy enough to put an internet facing Windows box on my network without AV. That said, I'll look into excluding my 3CX application.

Leon
 
I was a bit optimistic. This solution fixed my audio quality. In fact my users are raving about how much better it sounds. Unfortunately, the dropped call issue has not been resolved yet. I'm going to have to try to capture some logs and send them to support.

Leon
 
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