[asterisk-users] RAMDisk vs Extarnal server for recording

[Matt Florell]

On 10/21/09, David Backeberg <dbackeberg at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 7:36 AM, Robin <robin at zoap.org> wrote:
>  > Thanks for your response.
>  > The hardware I have now is not sufficient to set up a ramdisk (just 4 gb)...
>  > But memory is rather cheap nowadays. If i'd buf up the server with 8 extra
>  > gigs for use as a ramdrive, do you think that might be enough to record
>  > between 30-60 simultanious streams? Or should it be way more?
>
>
> I'm doing ramdisk recordings of about the same number of streams
>  you're talking, in 4GB.
>  I move out completed recordings once every 15 minutes or so via NFS,
>  and as such, I never use very much of the ramdisk. There's no rule
>  that says you have to use the whole 4GB of ram for recordings. I'm
>  probably staying below 100MB or so. Strictly speaking, I'm using both
>  ramdisk and external server, but the external server is just a
>  centralized system with larger disks.
>
>  However, I know that this arrangement isn't working for my load which
>  is about to double again, so I'm upgrading to better hardware (and
>  maintaining the status quo with my asterisk arrangement)
>
>  If you read every single title of asterisk-users in the last few
>  months, you'll find a similar discussion on this topic which went
>  through the pros and cons of ramdisk versus centralized server.
>
>  Somebody at that time mentioned particular names of programs that can
>  do the centralized recordings by doing network hardware level
>  replication and picking off the SIP packets. I've never done this, but
>  if you find that mailing list thread you'll be able to find names of
>  people who say they've done that.

We have a few clients that use Oreka(from OrecX) that does
network-based SIP packet-capture recording. It works very well on
their multi-server setups and the core of Oreka is Open Source.

MATT---