[asterisk-users] The new ConfBridge application is now in Asterisk Trunk!

[David Vossel]

----- Original Message -----
> From: "David Backeberg" <dbackeberg at gmail.com>
> To: "Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion" <asterisk-users at lists.digium.com>
> Sent: Monday, April 25, 2011 9:27:19 AM
> Subject: Re: [asterisk-users] The new ConfBridge application is now in Asterisk Trunk!
> On Mon, Apr 25, 2011 at 9:38 AM, David Vossel <dvossel at digium.com>
> wrote:
> > I am proud to announce that after a good bit of development,
> > community feedback, testing, and >code review, the brand new
> > ConfBridge application has been officially merged into Asterisk
> > >Trunk!!!
> > http://svnview.digium.com/svn/asterisk?view=revision&revision=314598
> >
> > If you are already familiar with ConfBridge from Asterisk 1.6.X and
> > 1.8, forget everything you >know. This is a completely revamped,
> > highly optimized, and feature rich conferencing >application capable
> > of mixing sample rates from 8khz all the way up to 192khz! Exciting
> > right?!
> 
> So way back when the 'old' ConfBridge was announced, my understanding
> was it was originally an internal Digium tool for exercising the
> Bridge() code and it was decided to release it to the public in the
> event the code might be useful to others. The old ConfBridge was
> missing stuff that was in MeetMe(), and wasn't that compelling for my
> particular usage.
> 
> This 'new' ConfBridge looks to be much more full-featured. So can
> anybody explain the motivation for this? Is this a replacement for
> MeetMe() where at a certain point we envision dropping MeetMe() from
> the codebase?

We needed a next generation conferencing application that could handle dynamic sample rates.  Meetme's mixing required the use of Dahdi and was locked in at 8khz.  This prompted the discussion of creating a new conferencing application to remove the Dahdi dependency and handle internal mixing of all possible sample rates.  Since a re-write was necessary to achieve this, a new configuration method was designed that we believe is much more powerful than MeetMe's configuration method.  There is no talk of removing support for MeetMe right now. We know people depend on MeetMe, so rest assured it is not going anywhere any time soon.

> Does ConfBridge() scale to many users as nicely as MeetMe? I'm
> assuming the MeetMe ability to use a hardware source for timing will
> still be superior with large user counts in rooms?

Incorrect, ConfBridge scales better than MeetMe.  Not just a little better, but a lot better.  My none official internal tests showed ConfBridge to be capable of 2 to 3 times more concurrent users than MeetMe using the 'drop_silence' confbridge.conf option.

-- 
David Vossel
Digium, Inc. | Software Developer, Open Source Software
445 Jan Davis Drive NW - Huntsville, AL 35806 - USA
Check us out at: www.digium.com & www.asterisk.org
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