Hopper
VICIdial's pre-loaded queue of leads ready to dial.
The hopper (vicidial_hopper table) is VICIdial's queue of leads waiting to be dialed. It's continuously refilled by a cron job that pulls leads from active lists, applies your DNC + recycling rules, and stages them for the auto-dialer.
Why it exists: dialing logic is faster when leads are pre-staged — auto-dial decisions don't need to walk the full list table.
Hopper level
Each campaign has a Hopper Level setting (default: 100). VICIdial keeps roughly that many leads ready per campaign. Set it higher for predictive dialing at scale; lower for tight DNC enforcement.
When to drain the hopper
If you change a campaign's filters or DNC config, the existing hopper rows still reflect the OLD config. Drain to apply changes immediately:
DELETE FROM vicidial_hopper WHERE campaign_id = 'YOURCAMP';
Cron will refill within ~30 seconds.