[asterisk-biz] Maximum Load

[Matthew Rubenstein]

	Thanks for the offer to help, and the quick followup.

	I already described the kind of useful benchmarks I need (and that
others have asked for), in my to this list message this afternoon, in
response to a request for "Maximum Load" estimates from Seysan. I have
quoted/appended it below (following quoted/appended messages from each
of Kevin and yourself mentioning yourself as the Digium contact point
for getting this info). If you'd like me to reiterate or rephrase that
benchmark request, I'm happy to do so.


On Wed, 2007-07-18 at 17:04 -0400, Jared Smith wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-07-18 at 16:40 -0400, Matthew Rubenstein wrote:
> > 	If the Asterisk community (eg. the asterisk-[users,biz] lists, user
> > groups, resellers, etc) wanted to register our interest in these
> > benchmarks, and even offer help producing them (in an organized way),
> > who at Digium would we contact? Is there anyone inside Digium who is
> > interested in seeing them produced, who we could help in the "campaign"?
> 
> That person would be me.  I'll go ahead and pass this along to the
> appropriate people inside Digium and see if we can't get some traction
> for some publishable benchmarks.  Feel free to contact me with the types
> of benchmarks you'd like to see done, and I'll see what we can do.


> On Wed, 2007-07-18 at 16:06 -0500, Kevin P. Fleming wrote:
> Matthew Rubenstein wrote:
> 
> > 	If the Asterisk community (eg. the asterisk-[users,biz] lists, user
> > groups, resellers, etc) wanted to register our interest in these
> > benchmarks, and even offer help producing them (in an organized way),
> > who at Digium would we contact? Is there anyone inside Digium who is
> > interested in seeing them produced, who we could help in the "campaign"?
> 
> Jared Smith (previously with Sokol) is now our Community Relations
> Manager, and it is his primary job to make sure that the commercial side
> of Digium is aware of what the community wants and needs. I would
> encourage you to contact him directly (like all Digium staff his email
> address is predictable... jsmith at digium.com) and let him know of your
> interest, especially if you are willing to provide any assistance in
> organizing the effort.


> On Wed, 2007-07-18 at 11:03 -0400, Matthew Rubenstein wrote:
> 	No one can answer that frequent question with a definite answer. There
> are more variables than whether Asterisk handles the media, though that
> is important. Transcoding per call, legs per call (conference), whether
> it's recorded to disk, ramdisk/network strategies, all multiply or
> divide the load per "call". Plus, server HW varies quite a lot more than
> some virtual "box".
> 
> 	Digium should perform a large test project on various kinds of popular
> hardware, and some optimized (per config) hardware, and publish the
> benchmarks. It would be good to know how many calls, with no
> transcoding, recording or any other bells & whistles other than just
> completing two legs, incoming and outgoing. On a single minimum HW
> config of, say, a generic P3/2.3GHz/1GB/100Mbps box, a
> P4/3.2GHz/1GB/100Mbs box, a 4x-Xeon/etc, and maybe a
> P2/500MHz/512MB/100Mbps notebook or something. Then give some estimates
> of how many MHz each extra operation (like each leg transcoding, or
> recording) consumes on each base HW config. And a formula for combining
> the features in a given Asterisk deployment into an estimate that can be
> used for capacity planning, including the overhead for Asterisk to load
> balance in a cluster.
> 
> 	A similar benchmarks table for OpenSER, both standalone and fronting
> for Asterisk, on those *identical HW configs* would be good. Or just a
> *quantitative* comparison of Asterisk capacity vs Asterisk + OpenSER (on
> two boxes). Though OpenSER doesn't have the corporate ($) organization,
> with a marketing team ($), that Asterisk has to complete that, it's a
> simpler benchmark process because OpenSER has so few combinations of
> configs. The OpenSER community can probably do it, after Digium
> publishes an Asterisk table for it to augment.
> 
> 	These are the kinds of basic benchmarks that any serious server product
> needs to publish. Without it, every developer and deployer is operating
> in the dark, by the seat of our pants. Each delivery requires that
> testing, so time and money is spent on a repetitive operation that could
> be done once, *by Digium, the vendor*. When competing with other
> servers, the more professional organizations will offer the benchmarks,
> while Asterisk has a harder time competing without them, or with a cost
> (including delay) to produce them, while looking less professional than
> "official" benchmarks.
> 
> 	It seems to me that this kind of benchmarking project would be a great
> way for Digium to train people about Asterisk. So Digium could do it at
> a training seminar or two. Especially now that Digium owns AstriCon, and
> Adtran owns both of them, I don't know why Digium would wait any longer
> to produce these valuable marketing/engineering data.
> 
> 	How about it, Digium? Help us to sell your products into more serious
> corporate environments.
> 
> 
> On Tue, 2007-07-17 at 23:19 -0600, Seysan wrote:
> > Hi Everyone,
> > 
> > I want to know how many concurrent calls can asterisk handle on a
> > Single Server BOX.
> > How many in Proxy State mode ? (that media passes through Asterisk)
> > and How many in Signaling mode ?
> > 
> > I think with a descent system, for an Office it can easily handle at
> > least 50 phone calls at the same time, but I want to know how many in
> > situation like Calling Cards or as a Softswitch like operation for
> > wholesale traffic. 
> > 
> > Is OpenSER or SER is better for wholesale and calling card ?
> > 
> > Thanks to all.
-- 

(C) Matthew Rubenstein