[asterisk-dev] Status of another channel from AGI

[Steven Critchfield]

On Fri, 2006-03-03 at 11:20 -0500, Paul wrote:
> Steven wrote:
> 
> <snip>
> 
> >Performance and security is not special to any interface of asterisk.
> >Performance isn't usually a quality of AGI that is taken really
> >seriously. Look at the many applications Tilghman has written so that
> >one doesn't need to spawn out to AGI to accomplish certain tasks. He has
> >mentioned before that he is trying to eliminate most needs for AGI and
> >help keep the development in the dialplan. 
> >
> If I were to take an existing dialplan and simply change all existing
> AGI invocations to use macros would it affect performance other than
> startup and reload when the macros are parsed? That would allow me to
> replace AGI with applications by simply changing a macro.

Startup is where my company is seeing the biggest hit. Granted our app
is a pretty large perl app, but it takes more than a second and
sometimes as much as two seconds to start. We have had to mask startup
by providing ringing after answer. 

Outside of startup the only other thing moving your application out of
AGI and into the dialplan would be in memory usage. Starting up an
external application to handle what could be done in the dialplan easily
can use a meg or more of memory that is totally removed from the pool
temporarily from asterisk use. 

I think scalability wise, dialplan logic is more scalable than AGI apps
per channel. 
-- 
Steven Critchfield <critch at basesys.com>