[Asterisk-Dev] TCP/IP Gigabit Ethernet accel. question

[alex at pilosoft.com]

On Sat, 12 Feb 2005, John Todd wrote:

> http://www.sbei.net/Products/SpecialtyCustom/toePCI-2Gx.htm
> 
> However, in light of the above discussions (and Kevin Fleming's similar
> comments) I'm less inclined to think that it's going to be a major
> benefit.  Most of the benefit of these types of cards seems to come from
> their TCP offloading, and RTP's UDP structure would only benefit from
> checksum generation, which seems to be a minor (if negligible?) benefit.
Keep in mind that checksum offloading is a common feature of low-end
gigabit cards now, even 50$ desktop gigabit card or onboard GE has it.

> As to the comment about "25000" sessions with Asterisk: well, this puts
> us back to the benchmarking quandry that Asterisk has suffered with for
> so long... being as there is very little of it.  I'm not suggesting that
> the 25000 session number is wrong, just that I'd love to know what the
> actual number _is_ after testing.  Enterprise users don't typically like
> phrases like "Theoretically, it should be fine for your call volume, but
> no, I have no idea how many sessions it will handle."
Yeah, its a great idea! Someone should do it! :)



> I keep looking for "magic tricks" which will improve Asterisk's
> performance, for two reasons: 1) so they can be proven to work, or 2)  
> so they can be dis-proven to work, but will force someone to publish the
> "breaking point" of the system under more sets of circumstances.  In the
> case of #2, then it becomes a more simple issue to repair the bug/limit
> when one knows it exists.
I think the problem is that everyone needs to do something different with 
Asterisk, thus performance figures I get with my application will 
differ from yours. In general, I didn't think anyone uses Asterisk in 
applications with >1000 concurrent sessions, I'd hope those people would 
have money for a proper softswitch, thus probably nobody cared enough to 
benchmark.

-alex