murmur - regular instability

[dempom]

I have installed murmur on an OpenVZ Ubuntu system. According to my provider I have 256 MB memory with another 256 MB burstable. When running mumble with 5-10 users, I never use more than 140 MB.

The problem I run into is that every once in a while the server will hit a period of instability during which all users disconnect but are able to reconnect a shortly after (1st or 2nd reconnect attempt). This instability period happens at least once a day and disconnects everyone 2-3 times. Right before the instability occurs, the voice quality drops and users sound jittery.

Any suggestions on how to narrow down where the problem is? Is it murmur? Is it the OS? Is it the hardware (insufficient resources, etc). Is it the OpenVZ provider?

[hacst]

Right before the instability occurs, the voice quality drops and users sound jittery.

Sounds like connectivity problems with the server. You can monitor the server with a tool like mtr/winmtr to make sure. Disconnects may also be caused by excessive io wait times (delay on disk accesses) which can lock up murmur's control thread, voice should keep working though so it doesn't quite fit your jittery description. All of these aren't problem with murmur itself but the environment (server/connectivity).

[flat20]

I have the same issue. I've tried Murmur on several different hosts and after about 40 minutes the voice starts to glitch and we get disconnected. The servers have all been various Debian servers. Perhaps this is a problem with the linux server code?

[hacst]

I have the same issue. I've tried Murmur on several different hosts and after about 40 minutes the voice starts to glitch and we get disconnected. The servers have all been various Debian servers. Perhaps this is a problem with the linux server code?

That's pretty unlikely considering the number of servers we have running out there. Servers are pretty uniform systems with a lot less of possible driver nastiness hidden in them compared to what a rich desktop software like say Mumble has to deal with on a desktop.

I can only reiterate what I said to dempom. The problems are very very likely stemming from network or other i/o issues with the machine or the path to it. CPU in theory can be an issue but Murmur needs very little of that so it usually isn't something you need to worry to much about (for a normal server that is, if you are running on a soho router....well... :mrgreen: ).

You should setup some monitoring on the host you are running the server on as well as monitor connectivity from the clients point of view. Only if that comes up clean there's a reason to consider Murmur as the culprit.

[flat20]

Yeah, you're right. It must be the hosting. Although it is odd that it's happened on two different servers of mine. I'll see if I can monitor it more closely when it happens.

[xhjfx]

We run Murmur on a Debian Wheezy install and have no issues with stability, only time it goes down is for reboots/kernel upgrade.

Setup something like smokeping and monitor your mumble server..

[dempom]

To follow up, ddot was correct in my case.

I have since moved the mumble database to a tmpfs. This is stopped all server instability I was experiencing. This suggests that the problems were disk i/o related.

ddot, out of curiousity: how often the database get written to or accessed?