[asterisk-users] Asterisk High-Capacity Stability

[Alex Balashov]

On Sat, 12 May 2007, Atlanticnynex said something to this effect:

> Thanks Alex, some great ideas. I think, however, I'm leaning towards 
> Asterisk at this point- since I have quite a bit of experience there, and 
> very little with SER. At this point, I'm wondering from a dimensioning 
> standpoint, what kind of capacity my machine will have (Dual Core Xeon 
> 2.4GHz 4GB RAM). As I said, I don't plan to do any transcoding. I read 
> the voip-info page on dimensioning and it seems theres some mixed 
> feelings about Asterisk in high-capacity environments. I guess I'm 
> looking for input as to whether Asterisk could handle roughly one DS3's 
> worth of calls (672 calls) just doing the LCR (I've seen some pre-built 
> LCR apps, looks like they all do on-the-fly MySQL queries- I think I'd 
> write my own AGI that would use a cache).

   It's really hard to say.  My personal impression from discussions I've 
witnessed on this subject is that you might be able to get away with 1/3rd 
of a DS3, and under no circumstances more.  But that doesn't mean you can't 
make this work with a few Asterisk servers and a proxy that routes requests 
to them in a round-robin and/or other load balancing fashion.  And of 
course, I could be completely wrong.

   I know that one of the main frustrations with Asterisk on the TDM side -- 
and yes, I know you're talking about SIP-to-SIP -- is that there is no way 
it can possibly scale to handle a DS3 of PRIs, and that approach at least
grants some possibility of hardware offloading.  This has led people to
have to use TNTs and other things that have DS3 adaptors as media gateways,
although finding adequate call logic / call control is not within the 
economic reach of most.

-- Alex

--
Alex Balashov   <sasha at presidium.org>