[asterisk-users] Asterisk High-Capacity Stability

[Zoa]

Several people do use it for handling > 50k minutes a day. (I'm one of 
them).
Yes, you need to know what you are doing, and have a nice design, but it 
is possible.Our code is only slightly altered. (mainly for billing 
purposes).

Zoa

Daryl Jurbala wrote:
> On May 12, 2007, at 4:11 PM, Atlanticnynex wrote:
>
>> 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).
>>
>>
>> With my hardware, could Asterisk run stable for this amount of traffic?
>> What stability issues does Asterisk have at this scale?
>>
>
> Simply put, NO.  I am on a project now where a client had an OpenSER 
> box acting as an SBC and registrar passing traffic to several asterisk 
> boxes which are doing LCR lookups on the fly as well as writing custom 
> CDRs all through PHP AGI scripts to a Postgres DB.  The Asterisk boxes 
> do not scale, and randomly start swallowing calls or, more often, 
> restart the process (safe_asterisk is handling this).  There is some 
> light IVR type usage for reporting account balances and the like.  
> With anything more than 80 or 90 calls on the box, the IVR prompts 
> start to break up.  Ben through replacing hardware, more memory, 
> different Asterisk builds, etc.
>
> I've had an open issue with Digium support on this for at least a 
> couple of weeks, and the best advice so far was "try using the SVN 
> build".  That makes things better, but it's still not anywhere close 
> to fixed..
>
> It's absolutely incredible that Asterisk works at all for some of the 
> situations its been put in - major kudos to the developers.  But I 
> don't think using it for what you're talking about is a long-term 
> business strategy.  When the highlight of the 1.6 release is bridging 
> channels, you know high volume sip to sip usage in a carrier class 
> call routing environment is NOT what development is focused on.  And 
> that's fine.  If you use a wrench to do the job of a screwdriver, you 
> shouldn't complain when you bust your knuckles
>
> That being said, I don't meant to trash Asterisk at all.  It's a 
> fantastic feature server, and a great PBX, both of which things I use 
> it for very successfully.  I just don't think it's ready to handle 50k 
> plus minutes a day SIP to SIP with LCR and billing data, no matter 
> what you do with it.  I'm 100% positive there are people out there 
> doing it successfully, but those are the exception, not the rule.  And 
> I doubt they are running unmodified code.
>
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