[asterisk-biz] Server for 100 concurrent calls

[alex at pilosoft.com]

On Sun, 10 Dec 2006, Craig Lawrence wrote:

<snip>

> We can only get around 90 concurrent calls from a Dell 2850 with dual
> 3.2Ghz 800FSB Xeons with a 4 port E1 hardware echo can card and 50% G729
> calls (RAM and HDD are not relevant issues).
>  Now the real question is whether Dual or Quad core Xeons OR 2 x Quad
> Core Xeons etc will do any better.
yes, somewhat.
>  
> It seems as though there are two schools of thought, those who argue
> Asterisk is multi-threaded and that this addresses the bottleneck issues
> and those that say it doesn’t.  I suspect that the second group are
> those who have tested dual/quad core processors.
asterisk is multithreaded
>  
> This is from Wikipedia (HYPERLINK
> "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asterisk_PBX#Criticism"http://en.wikipedia
> .org/wiki/Asterisk_PBX#Criticism):
>  
<crap snipped>
just because its monolythic, it doesn't mean its multithreaded.

also, just because its multithreaded, it doesn't mean some things have
very coarse granularity (like, SIP and IAX incoming messages were handled
by a single thread last time I looked).

what does it mean? YMMV. Some things will scale nearly linearly, some 
won't. 

> You may find that the safest solution is to have an external gateway (eg
> Vegastream) do the transcoding OR run 2 instances of Asterisk on 2
> machines with the machine with the TDM card only doing the transcoding
> and the other machine doing all the other work.  However this is more
> expense, more rack space and more complexity. 
I use max tnt for transcoding. perfect application for it. ;)