[Asterisk-Users] Processor

[Steven Critchfield]

On Mon, 2003-05-12 at 08:00, WipeOut . wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I am interested in the thoughts of the people who know the
> architecture of Asterisk quite well..
> 
> What I am interested in is the performace difference of Celeron vs P4
> vs Xeon.. I know Intel marketing says that servers should be Xeon,
> Workstations should be P4 and desktops should be Celeron and they are
> priced to the specific target market..
> 
> I am on a tight budget and so I am looking for the biggest "bang for
> the buck" in the server I will be putting together in the next week or
> so..
> 
> I don't think the standard processor rules apply when we are talking
> about Asterisk becasue it is not a file server or a data crunching
> database..
> 
> My thoughts here are that the L1 and L2 cache are not critical becasue
> the most important thing would be the handling of the TDM switching
> (interupts per second).. so this means that there probably isn't much
> difference between the different families of processor.. and so you
> should be able to achieve a comparible performance using a Celeron
> processor at a far cheaper price..
> 
> The fault in my thinking may come in the voice
> compression/decompression and transcoding area where a Celeron may not
> be able to buffer the data efficently in which case a P4 would
> probably be all that is required..
> 
> I don't see the need to go to a Xeon.. based on the large price
> difference for a Xeon system vs a P4/Celeron system..
> 
> What are your thoughts??

I guess it depends on the size of the deployment as to whether or not
the extra L1 and L2 cache makes a difference. I was pleasently surprised
at the speed of the Xeon P4 2.8ghz chip we had in here a couple of
months ago. 

If you are doing a lot of tasks/threads with compression, then the extra
cache would probably keep the compression code in cache and make it
faster and able to handle more load. 

I do have to say our PBX in the office is running on a 1.1g celeron and
doesn't seem to have any troubles. I have had 50 +-3 calls going at once
on it. The majority of the calls where interacting with a database and
writing a tone to a file uncompressed. 

My system at home doesn't get much load at all and it does all VoIP
gateway from my extensions at home. It is a 1ghz Athlon with a T100P
card in it. Which brings me to the point that for the price you still
can't go wrong with Athlon chips.

-- 
Steven Critchfield  <critch at basesys.com>