Re: [hylafax-users] What is your percentage of hard failures

[Andrew Taylor <ataylor@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Lee,
> Andrew Taylor wrote:
>
> > We have 18 modems here in the US handling about 4000 fax jobs a day 
> > with  a 35% average failure rate.
> > We also run HylaFAX in 12 overseas locations with single modem setups 
> > and see from 30-50% failure rate.
>
>
>
> Failure rates from 30 to 50% are catastrophic.  But, since you're 
> including "busy", "no carrier", and "no answer" results in your "error 
> count" that's going to throw things off.  Normally those kinds of 
> results should be discarded completely as there is no way to 
> categorically know if it was an error or if it wasn't.  Run 
> 'xferfaxstats' and divide the number of errors by the number of pages 
> transmitted.  That should be your "error rate".  That number should not 
> be anywhere near 30%.  On the bulk of the systems that I administer this 
> value is much less than 1%.

I use errorstats.sh to produce a daily report, which is what I base my 
failure rate on. We started using HylaFAX in March and early monitoring 
of performance showed that a lot of failures were due to bad data from 
the staff, not a problem with the package.

/u/sbin/xferfaxstats is run daily also. The most recent xferfaxstats 
output shows:
Total 2688  44:11:20    1.0   677, so about 25%.
But lines like this indicate a probable user problem:
(**xag)281   4:27:28    1.1   151   14400  2-D MR = 54% failure

> > I know of 1 fax machine that will not work with our MultiTechs, a 
> > Lexmark T520 printer/modem but I am sure there are others.
>
>
>
> I'd love to take a look at this session log and perhaps send a test fax 
> or two to the destination.  What kind of MultiTech modem are you using, 
> anyway?

I've sent you the error log for the Lexmark; I don't want to post it.

> > The most common problems are bad fax numbers or extremely busy numbers.
>
>
>
> They're problems, yes, but they shouldn't be counted as errors against 
> HylaFAX performance.

Quite right; I know our users enter a lot of bad numbers; some are also 
due to a problem in our applications, such as bad data in the fax field 
of our customer records. All faxes are generated from our operational 
software.
We don't know if we are getting better or worse performance with this 
package against the previous one, but we can certainly troubleshoot it 
much more. When users complain their faxes don't go through I can check 
specifics and invariably find it was not a problem with HylaFAX.

> Lee.
>
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