[Asterisk-Users] Asterisk with SMP hardware

[Kevin P. Fleming]

Andrew Aken wrote:
> Does anyone have any experience with running asterisk on multi-processor 
> computers (dual or quad)? Does asterisk on the latest Linux distros take 
> advantage of the extra processors, or does it predominately utilize a 
> single processor?

We run Asterisk on dual processor (Xeon) machines, and it works fine. 
Asterisk is very multi-threaded, so it does benefit from the extra CPUs 
(in our case, 4 since they are Hyper-Threaded). However, unless you are 
doing transcoding, Asterisk uses very little CPU power, and the extra 
CPUs are only helpful to ensure that things like disk I/O and network 
I/O don't keep Asterisk from getting CPU time.