[asterisk-users] asterisk and multiple cpus/cores

[Kevin P. Fleming]

Matthew Rubenstein wrote:
> 	I'm disappointed that Digium has not published exhaustive benchmarks on
> capacity planning on different HW configs for different running setups.

I'm sorry you are disappointed, but do you realize both the complexity
of doing any sort of 'exhaustive' benchmarks, and more importantly, the
fruitlessness of doing so? Sure, we could clearly define a simple test
case and push X number of calls through Y server, but as soon as the
user changes anything significant about the scenario, those numbers are
no longer useful, and probably can't be easily scaled either.

Generally speaking, Asterisk uses very little CPU. Transcoding of course
changes that, and many people have posted reports of what they have been
able to achieve using Digium's G.729 codec (for example).

When the user starts doing things like call recording,
ChanSpy/MixMonitor, MeetMe, and various other audio-processing tasks,
the CPU consumption will start to be very hard to predict unless the
system is doing _ONLY_ that task. For a normal installation where the
mix of tasks varies on a constant basis, at best you can have a
reasonable expectation of what can be achieved, but there is no way to
get an 'exhaustive analysis' that will be useful.