[asterisk-users] Asterisk concurrent calls count

[David Backeberg]

> I'm interested in how many concurrent calls Asterisk can process without
> troubles. I mean 1 Asterisk server (software) like either proxy or media
> server (any numbers will be appropriate).

Since one standard answer to this question is: "it depends on how
you're using it",

The ideal situation is that people could rattle off statistics of
their eventual load, and be able to size their hardware purchase
accordingly. The reality is that while that's hard, we can do the next
best thing, which is once you have the hardware running asterisk, get
historical data about your real-world asterisk load.

We're running the open SNMP daemon, and we've configured the open
software project Cacti to do SNMP polling against our cpu load. We now
have a few months of data on how two systems running Zaptel cards,
with no VoIP are holding up under load. Our business is amazingly
seasonal, not quite as bad as H & R Block, but similar scenario where
we're very busy parts of the year, and the rest of the year, not so
much.

Our results: at our US Eastern time zone business, load peaks a little
after 2pm EST/EDT, most business days, and dramatically tails off most
days. Once we have more months of data we'll also be able to more
accurately profile the seasonality of our business, as well as make
some predictions about next peaks from previous peaks, given the
growth rate of our business.

Hope this helps people!