[asterisk-users] Really Big Queues

[Christopher Snell]

Hi,

How do you folks handle really large queues (350+ simultaneous
callers) in your Asterisk PBXes?

We're going to be bringing in around 16 PRIs' worth of inbound
callers, doing skills-based routing, and queuing them up for
approximately 200 agents.

What's the best way to handle all of these callers?  We want to record
the calls and we'll probably use the ramdisk method that has been
discussed on this list.

Here's some ideas that I'm considering:

Idea #1:   Use servers with (2) Digium 4-port PRI cards, running
Asterisk, as media gateways.  From here, send calls to 2 or more
Asterisk queue servers.  For each incoming call, run an AGI on the
media gateways that determines which queue server is least loaded.
Send this incoming call to the queue server over an IAX2 trunk.  The
problem with this method is that the queues are not unified; if one
queue server suddenly has available agents, queued callers on the
other queue server cannot be (easily?) transfered to the server with
available agents.  Also, running an AGI for each incoming call is lame
and slow.

Idea #2:   Use 3com VCX V7122 media gateways to terminate the PRIs and
send the calls to a load balanced pair of SER proxies.  These proxies
will somehow keep track of the state of the Asterisk queue servers and
redirect the incoming calls to the least loaded (most available) queue
server.  The problem with this method is that, by using SIP, we'll
probably see higher interrupt load on the Asterisk queue servers.
Additionally, I'm not a SER expert yet and I have no idea how to get
SER to monitor the state of the Asterisk queue servers.  As with Idea
#1, the queues are also not unified, which sucks.

Idea #3:   ???????  (profit!)

Do you fine folks have any ideas or suggestions?

thanks,

Chris