[Asterisk-Users] Computing horsepower needed

[Rich Adamson]

> I have been reading asterisks and everything I can get my hands on for the 
> past week. I want to know what class processor is the bare minimum I need 
> for a four port Asterisk installation?

As a low-end data point (probably not cool for a reasonable production box),
I purchased a eMachine T2240 with a 2.2ghz Celeron, 40 gig drive, 384 meg
ram, with integrated 10/100 nic from Circuit City (new, open box, with
warranty, $300). Its running asterisk with 2 x100p's, festival, sendmail, 
apache, mysql, MOH, X11, Gnome, etc, just fine. Asterisk has three iax 
trunks running, a couple of remote nat'ed 7960's, a few local sip phones, 
and nothing very fancy for a dial plan. 

The size of the box (and its architecture) is far more related to voice
traffic volumes and uptime then it is anything else. (e.g, if you never
place a phone call, you don't need any resources; if you never click the
console mouse, gnome is not consuming any cpu resource, etc, etc.)

In an idle condition (no calls being processed), "top" is the heaviest
app. Placing a single asterisk demo call from a sip phone (forcing iax2
to Digium) causes asterisk to bump towards the top at about 0.3% cpu
utilization with an occasional random peak at 2% cpu. (A single pstn
call via x100p to a 7960 averages about 1.0% cpu. Both of these are
eyeball inspection of top.)

I don't know what you mean by "port" in your statement, so can't comment
on machine size. If you mean four physical pstn lines, I'd have to venture
a guess and say the above machine could handle four x100p's. But, as you've
already seen from the list, there are probably a dozen different ways to
configure * to support any given set of requirements with different
cost/benefit trade offs for each.

The above just happens to be one of the the "cheapest" around for new
assembled equipment with a so called warranty. Don't think I'd install
it at a hospital or police department though. ;)

Rich