[Asterisk-Users] Re: Hardware for handling large call volume

[Michael Welter]

Does anyone have a T400P running on an Athlon XP with four T1s?  Would 
96 channels require dual processors?

Thanks,

John Todd wrote:

> [moved to asterisk-users, as this is not a development question]
> 
> At 1:40 PM -0400 on 4/24/04, Sudhir Kumar wrote:
> 
>> I would like to hear from any of you who has done any kind of
>> benchmarking on a robust hardware that can handle large call volume,
>> preferably with G.729 codec involved.
>>
>> We are in the process of putting together a system that should have a
>> quad E1 card, G.729 and/or iLBC codecs. The test scenario we are
>> interested in:
>>     1. keeping all E1 lines saturated (SIP<->PSTN),
>>     and 2. as many SIP to SIP calls as possible.
>>
>> I will share our experience with this group.
>>
>> We would greatly benefit from any recommendation you can give us about
>> the hardware we should use. Mark, Jeremy, Steven, .... anyone.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> -- sudhir
> 
> 
> My rule of thumb has been 100 G.729 channels for a dual 3.0ghz Xeon 
> machine.  Cost: around $42 per channel (I buy SCSI systems with RAID, 
> and that includes the $10 charge for the G.729 license.)  Your mileage 
> may vary in both performance and price.  Cost for an AS5300-style 
> solution: around $110 per channel, and that's on the used market pricing 
> plan.  DSPs are nice if you have a lot of money, but the price for doing 
> DSP-type processing on generalized processors is dropping rapidly.  As 
> the saying goes: "Specialization is for insects."  Even with the 
> badly-coded g.729 codec, it's still impressively fast.
> 
> I have now been extremely satisfied with SuperMicro motherboards, so I'd 
> recommend them, and the guys at Silicon Mechanics (referred through 
> someone else here on this list from a while back... don't remember who) 
> have done outstanding work for me with those boards and first-rate 
> chassis/integrations/drives.
> 
> If you're doing SIP-to-SIP, you can often stay out of the media channel, 
> which means no transcoding overhead unless you have special requirements 
> (transfer, recording, etc.)  Of course, PSTN (PRI) termination will 
> always mean media conversion unless you're doing G.711.  Keeping a 
> system "saturated" means having busy signals, since to keep a system 
> saturated that implies having more 1 more call at your minimum moment in 
> the day than you have capacity to handle.
> 
> I've got on my plate the following things to measure (when I get a spare 
> moment of life, which at this rate may be never):
> 
>  - latency/jitter/packet loss on long-haul IAX2 trunks (i.e.: satellite)
>  - load testing G.729, ILBC, Speex, and other complex codecs as a 
> relative comparative load on a dual 3.0ghz Xeon machine (quantitative 
> testing, not seat-of-pants testing)
>  - maximal traffic density on 802.11[a,b,g] links with multiple IAX2 
> talkers (trunk mode)
>  - maximal traffic density on 802.11[a,b,g] links with multiple IAX2 
> talkers (normal mode)
>  - maximal traffic density on 802.11[a,b,g] links with multiple IAX2 
> talkers (routed)
>  - maximal traffic density on 802.11[a,b,g] links with multiple SIP 
> talkers  (normal)
>  - maximal traffic density on 802.11[a,b,g] links with multiple SIP 
> talkers  (routed)
> 
> JT
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-- 
Michael Welter
Introspect Telephony Corp.
Denver, Colorado
+1 303 674 2575
mike at introspect.com
www.introspect.com