[asterisk-biz] Performance on Pentium Dual Core CPUs

[Boris Bakchiev]

I'm surprised no one tested that for themselves yet.
Mind you the test I did was with Intel based codec because I didn't want
to buy so many codecs from Digium just to test the performance.

I did the test from g729 to alaw peers with round trip audio so both
encoder and decoder was working hard.

In this scenario, correct me if I'm wrong, each call had following path:
G729 client -> [asterisk transcode to slinear then to alaw] -> alaw
client -> [asterisk transcode to slinear then to g729] -> G729 client.

I verified the path in sip show channels.

With 50 Calls CPU usage was:
Cpu0  : 28.9% us,  7.5% sy,  0.0% ni, 57.2% id,  0.0% wa,  0.0% hi,
6.5% si
Cpu1  :  7.0% us,  1.5% sy,  0.0% ni, 91.0% id,  0.0% wa,  0.0% hi,
0.5% si

I could not test any more concurrent calls, as my desktop for alaw peers
was not fast enough.

As you can see, there is plenty of power in Pentium D and I presume that
AMD CPU's would be even better since the bus between CPU's is not shared
like in intel platform.

The system was Pentium D 830 coupled with 1GB PC2-6400 in dual channel
mode (2x DDR2-800 memory sticks) on Asus P5WD2 Premium motherboard
running software raid on SATA2 drives.

We noticed a big difference in system performance between PC2-5300 and
PC2-6400 so if you can afford it, get PC2-6400.

Regards

-----Original Message-----
From: asterisk-biz-bounces at lists.digium.com
[mailto:asterisk-biz-bounces at lists.digium.com] On Behalf Of Sergey
Kuznetsov
Sent: Monday, 5 June 2006 00:51
To: Commercial and Business-Oriented Asterisk Discussion
Subject: Re: [asterisk-biz] Performance on Pentium Dual Core CPUs

Kevin P. Fleming wrote:
> ----- Craig Lawrence <craig at mytel.net.au> wrote:
>
>   
>> PS. Dual processors are overkill unless you have an Asterisk version
>> that supports it (we don't).
>>     
>
> I don't know what you are talking about here... Asterisk is a heavily
threaded application, and will take full advantage of the number of
processors/cores in your system. Especially when transcoding is
involved, having multiple cores available makes a significant
difference.
>
> This has been true for all released versions of Asterisk; there was
never a released version of Asterisk that didn't 'support' multiple
processors.
>
>   
Kevin,

Can you share your expectations how many G729 transcodings can be done 
on dual dual-core Opterons or P4 with 4 Gb of memory on SIP-to-SIP 
environments ( no TDM or echocancelers involved)
My guess is about 250-300 simultaneous calls.

May be I am way to optimistic, that's why I am asking your educated 
expectations.