[asterisk-dev] OT: Is 1.6 ready for production? (was: Asterisk scalability)

[Leif Madsen]

Miguel Molina wrote:
> Well this is kinda offtopic, but then a key question comes to my head: 
> is asterisk 1.6 stable enough to use in a 24/7 production call center? I 
> am talking of several weeks of uptime with no crashes, deadlocks or 
> another issues. If it is, which branch of it? I've always thought of 1.6 
> as a development (new features, core changes) version, not a production 
> one. In my company there's some 1.2 still working out there to give you 
> an idea... so I think using 1.4 is just right for us at this time, with 
> a few backports of interesting 1.6 goodies.
> 
> By the way, I am trying to make things evolve faster here. ;)


That's kinda a loaded question. It really depends on what you're using it for. 
If you're using a strict set of tools which have been around for quite some 
time, and you've done your due diligence in the lab testing your dialplan and 
other things for load, call setup/tear down, etc... for a period of time (such 
as a couple of weeks with a traffic generator like SIPp or something similar), 
and you don't run into any issues, then yes, you're probably fine for production.

And really that doesn't just apply to 1.6.x. I'd say the exact same thing for 
1.2, 1.4, or trunk.

If you plan on rolling out the latest and greatest, using brand new 
applications, and expect to not require any testing what-so-ever, and want me to 
call it "production ready", then I'd just say you're crazy.

Perhaps you have an existing 1.4 infrastructure that does everything you need it 
for, but you want to add some additional feature that exists in 1.6.x. There is 
no need to upgrade the entire infrastructure, but rather just add another box 
running 1.6.x and direct calls to it when you need to utilize a specific 
feature. This way you don't dramatically change your infrastructure.

So to answer your question: yes it's ready, if you're ready to do the necessary 
testing.

Leif.