[Asterisk-Users] RE: Size limitations of extensions.conf

[trixter aka Bret McDanel]

On Mon, 2006-06-05 at 11:24 -0500, Moises Silva wrote:
> Asterisk support the concept of "configuration engine", this means
> that you can write a configuration engine to get the data from
> anywhere. The default configuration engine is "text_file_engine", that
> reads the configuration from text files. This engine does not have any
> limit in the code, so the only limit is the performance hit of
> starting or reloading. Actually some limits exists for the size of
> context names, nested includes etc, but no for number of lines.
> 
> Why dont use database engine? instead of large files?
> 
> Regards

That doesnt solve the root problem.  The configuration engine would be
called at startup/reload and load everything into memory.  A better
approach might be what some have done in private patches to read in
realtime each customers and only each customers information on a per
needed basis.  

Lets say you have a 'cluster' of asterisk servers that all feed off the
same database and in total you have several thousand hosted customers.
Each customer has many lines, possibly several hundred lines that would
form their extensions.conf entries.  

If you load that into memory you are consuming a lot of memory on each
box of your 'cluster' that will mostly be unused because not all of your
customers will receive calls on all the same systems.  Sifting through
all of this the way that is done also has a certain cost (although I
dont know the actual cost of doing it in a DB).  

If you load each customers configuration on demand you lower the memory
footprint and add the ability to have easier updates all at the same
time.  You can do some of this with realtime dialplans, but you cant get
the faster processing available that the one patch that does all of this
gets.

The way the dialplan works has its own problems (internally to asterisk)
with large extensions.conf.  For reference the one I am talking about
would be close to 200M if printed out, and a real pain to manage via any
of the standard 'engines'.


-- 
Trixter http://www.0xdecafbad.com     Bret McDanel
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