Cisco Unified Intelligent Contact Management Enterprise

This document explains the buffer and why it is used with Cisco Intelligent Contact Management (ICM).

A. A buffer is a holding place for data. The processes in ICM use or can use buffering. Buffering is used when a process is unable to transmit data to another process at a specific time. For example, on a Peripheral Gateway (PG), the PG Agent process communicates to the router through the Central Controller Agent process. When the PG Agent process on a specific PG is unable to communicate to the Central Controller Agent process, it stores the information intended for buffer.

The most common causes for the use of a buffer are network-related problems such as latency or complete loss of connections. When such performance-related issues cause the use of buffers, if the issues are not corrected, the buffers continue to fill.

Buffers have a fixed size. If a buffer reaches its limit, the associated process has no way of sending the information to its peer process and clear its own buffer. Eventually, the process that uses the buffer fails because it is overrun with data.

You can increase the buffer size. However, although the increase in the buffer size for a process may show an immediate resolution to a specific problem, it usually covers up the larger problem that the triggered buffer used in the first place.

When you troubleshoot any buffer-related problems on an ICM component, look for possible communications or network-related issues or performance problems on one or more of the machines involved. It should be the goal to solve the cause and not increase the buffer size. While an increase in the buffer may be needed in some cases, this should only be done under the direction of a Cisco ICM TAC Engineer.

All ICM processes can be affected by a buffer problem.

A. Here are some symptoms of a buffer overflow:

• One or more processes bounce.
• One or more processes drop the connection to the peer process and reconnect.
• The process window or the logfile of the process displays the this message:

  Fail: Buffer Pool Exhausted (1024 buffers allocated)