[Asterisk-Dev] Can * do this?

[Roderick Montgomery]

According to Kris Cote:
> Here is a n excerpt from a client of mine.
>  
> "...black box that would send out
> a list of phone numbers and a message that would be delivered.  Need speed
> to deliver 5000 15-second messages in 10 mins.  That would be 15 seconds
> plus ring time and OGM time for voice mailboxes..."

Presuming an rough average of 25 seconds -- fifteen second message plus an
estimated ten seconds more for call setup, ring before answer/timeout, TAD
OGM, and call teardown...

That's 25 seconds per call cycle * 5000 calls = 125000 channel-seconds.

To process 125000 channel-seconds within 10 minutes (600 seconds), you'll
need just over 208 channels (about 9 T1s). IIRC, the greatest recommended
concentration of Digium T1 interfaces in a single PC is 8 (184 channels), so
you'd probably need two asterisk servers to split the workload.

If you relaxed your client's expectation just slightly in the interest of
cost savings, you could get the same 125000 channel-seconds done using just
two Wildcard TE410Ps (eight T1s) in under twelve minutes.

As a completely separate means of attacking the project, you might ask the
good folks at Nufone.net about processing that call volume for you. At their
current rates, you could do about 20 of those 5000-call blasts before you
paid for just the two TE410Ps.


> Does this sound like some Asterisk can handle? If this were the only app.
> that ran, what hardware would best suit this?

Don't skimp on your server hardware for the host system -- I run asterisk on
a solid Penguin Computing server; Steven highly regards Supermicro, which
I've also used for other purposes with great success. Check the archives for
other tips. I haven't run density like 184 active ports on asterisk before,
but with your application, there's no codec transcoding or AGI overhead,
either: just gen up the files in /var/spool/asterisk/outgoing.

Absolutely, asterisk can handle this application -- assuming it's not some
form of telemarketing, in which case asterisk will segfault and play dead.

rm
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 Roderick Montgomery   rod at thecomplex.com   <URL:http://thecomplex.com/>
the fool stands only to fall, but the wise trip on grace... [Sarah Masen]
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