On May 12, 2007, at 4:11 PM, Atlanticnynex wrote:
Thanks Alex, some great ideas.
I think, however, I'm leaning towards Asterisk at this point- since
I have quite a bit of experience there, and very little with SER.
At this point, I'm wondering from a dimensioning standpoint, what
kind of capacity my machine will have (Dual Core Xeon 2.4GHz 4GB
RAM). As I said, I don't plan to do any transcoding. I read the
voip-info page on dimensioning and it seems theres some mixed
feelings about Asterisk in high-capacity environments. I guess I'm
looking for input as to whether Asterisk could handle roughly one
DS3's worth of calls (672 calls) just doing the LCR (I've seen some
pre-built LCR apps, looks like they all do on-the-fly MySQL
queries- I think I'd write my own AGI that would use a cache).
With my hardware, could Asterisk run stable for this amount of
traffic?
What stability issues does Asterisk have at this scale?
Simply put, NO. I am on a project now where a client had an OpenSER
box acting as an SBC and registrar passing traffic to several
asterisk boxes which are doing LCR lookups on the fly as well as
writing custom CDRs all through PHP AGI scripts to a Postgres DB.
The Asterisk boxes do not scale, and randomly start swallowing calls
or, more often, restart the process (safe_asterisk is handling
this). There is some light IVR type usage for reporting account
balances and the like. With anything more than 80 or 90 calls on the
box, the IVR prompts start to break up. Ben through replacing
hardware, more memory, different Asterisk builds, etc.
I've had an open issue with Digium support on this for at least a
couple of weeks, and the best advice so far was "try using the SVN
build". That makes things better, but it's still not anywhere close
to fixed..
It's absolutely incredible that Asterisk works at all for some of the
situations its been put in - major kudos to the developers. But I
don't think using it for what you're talking about is a long-term
business strategy. When the highlight of the 1.6 release is bridging
channels, you know high volume sip to sip usage in a carrier class
call routing environment is NOT what development is focused on. And
that's fine. If you use a wrench to do the job of a screwdriver, you
shouldn't complain when you bust your knuckles
That being said, I don't meant to trash Asterisk at all. It's a
fantastic feature server, and a great PBX, both of which things I use
it for very successfully. I just don't think it's ready to handle
50k plus minutes a day SIP to SIP with LCR and billing data, no
matter what you do with it. I'm 100% positive there are people out
there doing it successfully, but those are the exception, not the
rule. And I doubt they are running unmodified code.
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