[Asterisk-Users] Asterisk in Production

[Waldo Rubinstein]

I was reading on the wiki different possibilities of automatically  
restarting asterisk every so often. In some places, people mention  
they restart it once a day other on shorter or longer intervals. I  
believe the main reason people are doing this is because of possible  
memory leaks.

I'm running a system for IVR services. It's not a heavily loaded box,  
but there is almost always someone using the system. I issued a  
restart when convenient but it's been 10 days and it hasn't  
restarted. I wonder if it's really necessary to restart asterisk? Are  
there really memory leaks? The machine has 1 GB RAM. When I boot the  
machine fresh with asterisk, it uses approximately 80 MB of RAM when  
I run top. After 10 days, top shows that it's using 730 MB of RAM.

Then I wonder, what would happen if this was a busy system? Would I  
be forced into having to restart asterisk and potentially dropping  
all active calls? What are other people doing? I asked a question  
about whether there are people out there offering vonage-like  
services running on top of asterisk and I received several responses.  
I assume that if there is some sort of traffic on those boxes, they  
may be suffering from similar symptoms.

What are the recommendations for maintaining a production asterisk  
system and these "potential bugs" that cause memory leaks?

Thanks,
Waldo