[asterisk-dev] Feature Request - new manager commands - 'getcontexts' and 'getcontext'

[Curt Moore]

On Sun, 2007-06-10 at 23:33 -0500, Brandon Kruse wrote:
> The majority of the huge asterisk installs out there, I believe are done
> through config file editing, if not realtime. People that have been
> using asterisk for awhile, though I could be wrong..... :]

Yes, realtime is definitely the way to go when trying to run an Asterisk
system with more than a few hundred users.  Otherwise, you have lots of
overhead dealing with text file processing; generating the text files,
reloading the configs into memory, etc.  It's very nasty.  There are
already engines which deal well with storage and retrieval of large
amounts of data, they are called databases. :-)  Not to mention the
really fancy ones support referential integrity which makes things much
easier.

I think that the thought process should be, at some cutoff point, it
becomes more efficient for scaling purposes to shift away from plain
text files and over to a realtime based architecture.  What this point
is will greatly depend on the number of customers and the underlying
hardware upon which the customers are expected to be served.  In the
case of applications such as the Asterisk appliance, it may not be
feasible to have 400 users being served using standard config files
since the amount of text processing is just too great when it is
expected to use the GUI to manipulate the plain text files.  If you then
shift over to a realtime based architecture where a database is handling
all of the processing of the text files and all Asterisk has to do is
just load the information, you've just free'd up lots of CPU cycles to
do more call processing instead of playing with text files.

This is not to say that realtime in its current incarnation is perfect,
there are many improvements which could be made which would make it more
lightweight and scalable but it works pretty darn well for what it does.
Just be wise and know your limitations.

-Curt