[asterisk-users] Breaking news, but what happened? 11.000 channels on one server

[Steve Totaro]

On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 8:59 AM, Olle E. Johansson <oej at edvina.net> wrote:

> Hello Asterisk users around the world!
>
> Recently, I have been working with pretty large Asterisk
> installations. 300 servers running Asterisk and Kamailio (OpenSER).
> Replacing large Nortel systems with just a few tiny boxes and other
> interesting solutions. Testing has been a large part of these
> projects. How much can we put into one Asterisk box? Calls per euro
> invested matters.
>
> So far, we've been able to reach about 2000 channels of G.711 with
> quad core CPU's and Intel Pro/1000 network cards in IBM servers. At
> that point, we see that IRQ balancer gives up and goes to bed, and all
> the traffic is directed to one core and the system gives up. We've
> been running these tests on several systems, with different NICs and
> have been working hard to tweak capacity. New drivers, new cards, new
> stuff. But all indications told us that the problem was the CPU
> context switching between handling network traffic (RTP traffic) and
> Asterisk. This was also confirmed from a few different independent
> software development teams.
>
> Imaging my surprise this Monday when I installed a plain old Asterisk
> 1.4 on a new HP server, a DL380 G6, and could run in circles around
> the old IBM servers. Three servers looping calls between them and we
> bypassed 10.000 channels without any issues.  SIP to SIP calls, the
> p2p RTP bridge, basically running a media proxy. At that point, our
> cheap gigabit switch gave up, and of course the NICs. Pushing 850 Mbit
> was more than enough. The CPU's (we had 16 of them with
> hyperthreading) was not very stressed. Asterisk was occupying a few of
> them in a nice way, but we had a majority of them idling around
> looking for something to do.
>
> So, please help me. I need answers to John Todds questions while he's
> treating me with really good expensive wine at Astricon. How did this
> happen? Was it the Broadcom NICs? Was it the Intel 5530 Xeon CPU's? Or
> a combination? Or maybe just the cheap Netgear switch...
>
> I hope to get more access to these boxes, three of them, to run tests
> with the latest code. In that version we have the new hashtables, all
> the refcounters and fancy stuff that the Digium team has reworked on
> the inside of Asterisk. The trunk version will propably behave much,
> much better than 1.4 when it comes to heavy loads and high call setup
> rates.
>
> We're on our way to build a new generation of Asterisk, far away from
> the 1.0 platform. At the same time, the hardware guys have obviously
> not been asleep. They're giving us inexpensive hardware that makes our
> software shine. Now we need to test other things and see how the rest
> of Asterisk scales, apart from the actual calls. Manager, events,
> musiconhold, agi/fastagi... New interesting challenges.
>
> So take one of these standard rack servers from HP and run a telco for
> a small city on one box. While you're at it, buy a spare one, hardware
> can fail ( ;-) ).
> But don't say that Asterisk does not scale well. Those times are gone.
>
> /Olle
>
> ---
> * Olle E Johansson - oej at edvina.net
> * Open Unified Communication - SIP & XMPP projects
>
>
I always was a fan and recommended IBM DL380s if not 360s (dual power
supply).

I would like to see some benchmarking on the AMI.  Not sure how to do it but
that used to be a very weak link.  I wonder if, and how much it has improved
over 1.2.x

-- 
Thanks,
Steve Totaro
+18887771888 (Toll Free)
+12409381212 (Cell)
+12024369784 (Skype)
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