[asterisk-users] Stable-Stable Asterisk

[Matt Florell]

On 8/24/07, Joshua Colp <jcolp at digium.com> wrote:
> Doug Lytle wrote:
> > Tzafrir Cohen wrote:
> >> On Fri, Aug 24, 2007 at 07:33:21AM -0400, Steve Totaro wrote:
> >>
> >> stability problems) with 1.0, ahve already migrated to 1.2 or 1.4, and
> >> now swear (by?) 1.2 or 1.4.
> >>
> >>
>
> I'm going to end this email with a question myself... how many people
> have Asterisk on a development/staging server before deployment, test,
> and isolate the issues they may have in their specific scenario?

First, I must say that the current Asterisk 1.2 tree IS more stable
than the last 1.0 release under heavy load, it also has many more
features which make the choice between 1.0 and 1.2 a no-brainer.

As for 1.4 It is FAR better today than when it was first released as
1.4.0. A lot of the critical bugs have been fixed, and the more
complex ones are left that are harder to reproduce, but those are
getting fixed as well. I applaude Digium for putting more resources
into bug fixing, and it has made a noticable difference in the 1.4
tree.

With all of that said, I do have a testing setup that allows me to run
tests at high loads on Asterisk, but not all scenarios can be checked
in a testing setup. I ran a mid-volume test on 1.4.10 and it worked
without crashing. I wanted to test a new feature in 1.4 so I put the
server into production. It worked fine for a few hours under small
load, but once the load increased there were several issues(mostly
relating to stuck locks I am guessing) and the server would crash
every few hours and also have some weird Manager API issues. So after
a few days I rolled the server back to 1.2.X and all was well again.
Running the tests again later at a higher call volume and on servers
with more horsepower revealed the same crashes and other issues as I
noticed in production.

I would like to donate my services to Digium to install a performance
testing setup, like I have, at Digium headquarters. They just need to
supply the two servers, two quad T1 cards and 4 crossover T1 cables,
and I will setup VICIDIAL and show anyone there how to run it in
performance testing mode. It is great at exposing performance problems
and it generates pretty graphs to boot.

Someone at Digium can contact me off-list if they are interested.

MATT---