[asterisk-users] Asterisk concurrent calls count

[Steve Edwards]

On Sun, 18 May 2008, Steve Totaro wrote:

> On Sun, May 18, 2008 at 12:32 AM, Jay R. Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:
>> On Sat, May 17, 2008 at 06:43:51PM -0400, Steve Totaro wrote:
>>> Maybe next they will charge $250 for "conference bridge" capabilities.
>>>  It's a joke to cripple things that can be enabled by flicking a
>>> switch.

If a feature adds value to a product, the customer will pay more for it. 
If a feature increases your support cost, you will charge more for it.

> I guess I hate to see something I have viewed as such a huge paradigm
> shift and disruptive force from selling boxes to selling knowledge.

If I buy a bare DL380 from you, will it cost the same as a fully loaded 
DL380 configured, optimized, and guaranteed to handle 400 seats? I think 
you sell your "knowledge" as well as a "box" as well as your time.

> I do however, think that Digium should provide some rough concurrent
> call figures and I guess that is how I got off topic on this SwitchVox
> tangent.  There are some common feature sets, especially when looking
> at PBX functionality with or without Zap or transcoding hardware that
> could be published (with a disclaimer of course).  There are also
> common server platforms but that is more of a moving target.

Someone brought up the TPC benchmark. The purpose of the benchmark is to 
"standardize" a synthetic processing load to allow competing vendors to 
beat their chests. Who is competing with Digium? Where is the competition? 
It's not in software, its in hardware. Thus, the competitors are IBM, 
Dell, HP, Zonbu, etc. Since our marketplace is so small, the 
aforementioned vendors are not interested in the market so the burden 
falls to the interested parties -- us.

If we can agree on a couple of benchmark scenarios, we can then test our 
hardware and post our results to the wiki in table and graph form.

In the interest in starting the process, here are a couple of metrics I'd 
be interested in.

) What is the maximum number of simultaneous calls (1 on 1 conversations) 
that can be bridged before call quality is impaired>

) What is the maximum number of simultaneous calls that can be put into a 
single meetme conference before call quality is impaired>

) What is the maximum number of 3 person (agent, customer, supervisor) 
meetme conferences before call quality is impaired>

How do you objectively measure call quality? Pass a sine wave at the upper 
and lower range of a human voice and compare the waveforms?

How do you construct a "standard" benchmark test bed? 2 identical Asterisk 
systems, 1 beating on the other?

These metrics should be run for each technology (IAX, SIP, TDM via T1, TDM 
via USB) as well as Asterisk version (1.2, 1.4, 1.6)

There are a lot of variables (OS flavor, OS version, OS tweaks, gcc 
version, network interface and driver, etc.) that need to be identified 
and as we collect more samples we may discover that some of these 
variables are important and some are not. This implies that at least in 
the "beta" stage of developing a benchmark, submitters must "own" their 
samples and be willing to re-run tests as the benchmark is refined.

Thanks in advance,
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Steve Edwards      sedwards at sedwards.com      Voice: +1-760-468-3867 PST
Newline                                             Fax: +1-760-731-3000