[asterisk-biz] Performance on Pentium Dual Core CPUs

[Sergey Kuznetsov]

Boris,

Thanks a lot!
You proved my thoughts.


All the Best!
Sergey.


Boris Bakchiev wrote:
> Kevin,
>
> Just to prove the point that Asterisk is great I got 2 SQL servers
> (couple of 6x cpu xeon servers) to host as sip peers.
> Those are much faster then the previous Celerons.
>
> The results kinda puzzled me.
> With 300 calls I get:
> Cpu0  : 21.9% us, 10.0% sy,  0.0% ni, 60.2% id,  0.0% wa,  0.0% hi,
> 8.0% si
> Cpu1  :  0.0% us,  1.0% sy,  0.0% ni, 99.0% id,  0.0% wa,  0.0% hi,
> 0.0% si
>
> Just got a friend in US who works for ITSP there to test the same
> scenario with Digium codec on almost identical server (same CPU, mem,
> motherboard)
> Cpu0  : 16.4% us
> Cpu1  :  0.5% us
>
> So it appears that Digium codec is better performing then IPP based one.
>
> Show channels shows:
> 600 active channels
> 300 active calls
>
> Sip show channels shows 300 alaw and 300 g729 channels.
>
> Iptraf shows:
> Incoming rates:    3510.0 kbits/sec
> 6200.2 packets/sec
> Outgoing rates:    1284.1 kbits/sec
> 			 1114.4 packets/sec
>
> And I can see a flurry of the traffic on the interfaces.
>
> As I'm writing, SMP rebalanced the load so it is now:
> Cpu0  : 10.9% us, 11.9% sy,  0.0% ni, 71.1% id,  0.0% wa,  0.0% hi,
> 6.0% si
> Cpu1  :  8.4% us,  4.9% sy,  0.0% ni, 86.7% id,  0.0% wa,  0.0% hi,
> 0.0% si
>
> Are my missing something?
> Perhaps the conditions are "near perfect" but the encoder and decoder
> still doing they job and on take 10% of the systems capacity.
>
> I think the whole test was affected by the CPU's cache. I think all the
> data was cached and since server was doing nothing else but transcoding
> all active code and data was cached in CPU's L2.
>
> This makes all kind of benchmarking useless as far as I can see as it is
> almost impossible to replicate a working system with test tools.
>
> I welcome the idea of hardware G729 as it would be a more sensible
> approach for production systems.
>
> Regards
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: asterisk-biz-bounces at lists.digium.com
> [mailto:asterisk-biz-bounces at lists.digium.com] On Behalf Of Kevin P.
> Fleming
> Sent: Monday, 5 June 2006 02:53
> To: Commercial and Business-Oriented Asterisk Discussion
> Subject: Re: [asterisk-biz] Performance on Pentium Dual Core CPUs
>
>
> ----- Sergey Kuznetsov <asterisk_biz at deeptown.org> wrote:
>
>   
>> 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.
>>     
>
> I don't have any first-hand experience, as we don't do performance
> benchmarking like that.
>
> In any case, the amount of memory will make no difference at all. The
> clock speed of the CPUs and the speed of the memory bus will be the
> determining factors, so realistically I would expect the Opterons to
> perform better than P4s due to their much more efficient memory
> subsystem.
>
> However, I can say that I doubt any existing PC-type platform will be
> able to achieve 250 or 300 simultaneous G.729 transcodes; any single box
> that could handle that would cost far more than a pair of
> lower-performance systems to do the same thing (think scaling
> horizontally, not vertically). In addition, when Digium releases the
> hardware G.729 transcoder board in the near future this will become less
> of an issue for deployments of that size.
>
>