[Asterisk-Users] Thousands of contexts?

[Jeremy McNamara]

Manuel Wenger wrote:
> By reading the Wiki's I found out that an Asterisk server with many (>10000) extensions and/or SIP users can become slow when reloading. But what happens when you also have many contexts in extensions.conf? More precisely, one context for each SIP user?
> 
> I need this because I will have users with random usernames that they can choose, but I obviously cannot set that username as the outgoing caller ID when passing the call to our PSTN gateway. I need to change the CLI before dialling out. Now, every SIP user has his CLI, so I thought of creating a context for every user, where I would SetCallerID() before issuing the Dial() command. Obviously I would use some sort of script reading from a database to re-create the extensions.conf and sip.conf after making changes.
> 
> Do you see any issues which could arise? Is Asterisk going to crash, or is it just going to be slow when reloading?
> 


You need to learn more about Asterisk, especially power of Asterisk's 
dial plan.  There is absolutely no need for thousands of contexts on one 
box.

We have a tremendous amount of endpoints on our various systems, yet we 
only have 4 or 5 contexts.

If you cannot use the callerid directive in the sip.conf (or equivalent) 
to set the callerid once and forget it, you can always use astdb to 
store and have the ability to update callerid in real-time.

Then again, you could do what we do and let the customer specify their 
own callerid, until we receive any complaints then we would simply 
override it with a callerid directive in the appropriate config file on 
our system.


Jeremy McNamara