[Asterisk-Users] "Defragmenting" mailboxes

[Chris Albertson]

That's very close to my suggestion.  It is scalable but
only to a point.  As soon as you are so big as to require
multiple Asterisks servers you will have the same problem
as the guys who run large e-mail servers.  Te first step
would be to NFS mount the mail dir from an NFS server
running some kind of RAID.  Don't laugh.  Around here they
have 5,000 voicemail boxes with 25MB limits on each.

The current pthreads based locks don't work across mutiple
servers so something needs to be done once you move out of
the small office environment. The maildir design would work
for up to a few thousand users

I like DBMS based designs as they make web based interfaces
easy to implement and would scale to unlimited size, say to
someone like Verizon with a few tens of million of users.



--- Andrew Kohlsmith <akohlsmith-asterisk at benshaw.com> wrote:
> > There is a C Library function that will return a unique
> > file name. (see man mkstemp)
> > That's the best way to go.  It is generally a
> > bad design to encode any information in a file name.  Better to
> > simply use the file's date/time stamp to order the messages.
> 
> I was speaking with tclark on IRC about this this past weekend.
> 
> What is wrong with using Maildir/ type interfaces for voicemail?  
> 
> Maildir is a very straightforward, scalable and distributable way of
> storing 
> things like email (and voicemail).  Each mailbox has this format:
> 
> ./
> tmp/
> cur/
> new/
> 
> When a new voicemail is created, you mkstemp in tmp/ and create the
> file.  
> Once it's done, you mv it to /new.  When it's listened to or
> otherwise 
> accessed, it's mv'd to cur where it stays until deletion.
> 
> So to recap:  create and manipulate in tmp/, move to new/ once done. 
> When 
> no longer new, move to cur/ and leave there.  No funky locking,
> totally NFS 
> safe and very fast, since each voicemail is just a file.
> 
> There's no patents or any kind of software encumberances to this
> technique, 
> either.
> 
> Regards,
> Andrew
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=====
Chris Albertson
  Home:   310-376-1029  chrisalbertson90278 at yahoo.com
  Cell:   310-990-7550
  Office: 310-336-5189  Christopher.J.Albertson at aero.org
  KG6OMK

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