[asterisk-users] Suggestion of Server Specifications for Asterisk

[Benny Amorsen]

Steve Edwards <asterisk.org at sedwards.com> writes:

> Won't 200 simultaneous calls result in a lot of 'head thrashing' that
> would be avoided by staging the recordings to some form of
> non-mechanical storage and then copying the the recording at the
> completion of the call?

The extX family of file systems probably will not be clever enough to
try to unfragment the writes; they will likely all end up in one long
fragmented stream. This is exactly what you want if you do not expect
to actually listen to more than a small fraction of the recordings.

If you do expect to listen to most of the recordings, copying them
after they have been written is a great idea. Especially if you have
an off-peak time where the disk is idle anyway, or by placing them on
RAM-disk if you can afford to lose some.

Frankly I would not worry too much, just use reasonably modern
hardware with support for write barriers, enable write caching, use a
not-too-clever filesystem, and go RAID-1 on just two disks.

You could make a ridiculously fast system with NILFS2 and SSD though...


/Benny