[asterisk-users] Maximum Number of Calls Asterisk Can Handle

[John C. Wolosuk Jr.]

Can anyone share their experience on the maximum number of calls a given 
asterisk box/asterisk software can handle?
I see the asterisk business edition can handle up to 240 simultaneously 
with appropriate licensing, but that doesn't seem to be many at all.

For now, I plan to use the stable open source versions - would it be 
reasonable to say that it is more of hardware limitation on the number 
of calls that can be made simultaneously, or are there only so many 
calls the asterisk software programming is equipped to handle 
simultaneously?

Also is the asterisk software written to effectively take advantage of 
multiple processors?

The systems I plan to use for asterisk have the following specs:

dual 2.8GHZ+ Pentium's
2GB RAM+
Gigabit interfaces

In my situation, I have no plans to run anything other than G.711/SIP, 
so my transcoding need is probably only limited to the playback of 
pre-recorded messages as well as any processing involved in leaving 
voicemail.

in theory, a gigabit interface can move 1048576Kbit/sec - now if i 
generously allocate 96Kbit/sec for every G.711 call, the network 
transport can handle, again in theory, 10922 simultaneous calls. would 
it be wrong to expect performance near this mark for the asterisk software?

Feedback appreciated,

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John C. Wolosuk Jr.
Unix/Linux Systems Administrator
Academic Computing & Communications Center
University of Illinois @ Chicago

E-Mail: jwolosuk at uic dot edu
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