Hi folks,
I've been looking into a Digium customer issue where ConfBridge audio
has been dropping out. The main issue there had to do with DNS, and
there is currently a review [1] up to fix that.
A secondary issue, though, is that there would be brief audio cutouts
when participants joined and left the conference. Looking into it, I
believe the problem is that when a participant enters or leaves the
bridge, the BRIDGEPEER channel variable is updated for every remaining
participant in the bridge. The basic algorithm is like this:
* Lock the bridge
* Iterate through the channels in the bridge (a maximum of 11 of them)
* Lock the channel
* Append the channel to an array of channel names
* Unlock the channel
* Iterate through the channels in the bridge again (no upper limit this
time)
* Lock the channel
* Set the BRIDGEPEER channel variable using the names in the
generated array from before (comma-separated)
* Unlock the channel
* Unlock the bridge
In addition, this same process occurs every time an announcement is
played into a bridge, such as join/leave beeps. Playing an announcement
involves pushing an announcer channel into the bridge and then removing
the announcer channel when the playback completes.
My question to the list is this: do you find value in having the
participants in a multi-party bridge packaged into the BRIDGEPEER
channel variable? I know that for two-party bridges, there are probably
lots of scripts and dialplans out there that rely on that variable to be
set; my question specifically is for bridges with more than two parties.
My thoughts on the matter are that since bridges are query-able now
directly, getting the list of participants from the bridge makes more
sense than trying to get the participants based on a single channel in
that bridge. In addition, the code places a hard limit on the number of
channel names it will actually put in the BRIDGEPEER variable. The code
currently has a #define that makes it so that only the first 11 channels
in the bridge will have their names in BRIDGEPEER. Because of the
hard-coded maximum, if you have more than 11 channels in the bridge, you
can't get the full list of participants using BRIDGEPEER.
By not setting BRIDGEPEER on channels in multi-party bridges, we can
avoid holding the bridge ransom while calculating the value and setting
the variable.
Let me know what your thoughts are on the matter.
Thanks,
Mark Michelson
[1] https://gerrit.asterisk.org/#/c/3445
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