On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 8:59 AM, Olle E. Johansson <o...@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 - o...@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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