Hey Jon, This comes up on the voice ops list pretty regularly. Some folks have mentioned SIPVicious as a method for sip testing, but I think that's more for pentesting.
The Empirix stuff seems to be the state of the art today. On a previous thread I talked a bit about quality monitoring and why the stuff in the industry today isn't really giving you the kinds of feedback you're looking for, but load testing is a different problem. If you do end up playing with the interrupt timers on the NICs, and you're successful, I'd love to hear what worked. Some food for thought: we've got a set of tickets open with the TAC because a large router (sorry I don't have the model number) bricked in a repeatable fashion at 300 calls per second. It shouldn't be true, but sometimes the gateway device is the limitation, although I don't know if this is applicable in your example. Anyways, I'm sorry I can't be of more help, but I personally see load testing at scale as a big unsolved problem for operators. Cheers, Joshua Sent from my iPad On Jul 25, 2013, at 7:32 AM, "Jon Chleboun" <jon.chleb...@gmail.com> wrote: > I am interested to see if y'all have recommendations for putting together a > SIP load testing platform using general purpose hardware and open-source > (or inexpensive) software. We are aware of Empirix Hammer and similar > solutions, and we are looking to see if there is an alternative option. > > Goals: > - Generate somewhere on the order of 20k phone calls with real SIP and RTP. > - Route the flows through our VoIP infrastructure to test performance > limits. > - Receive and analyze the SIP and RTP on the other end to find out at what > load the signaling and/or media start to break down. > > Attempted already: > - SIPp spread across many servers. Here the limiting factor seemed to be > the CPU load from the interrupts from each packet. The CPU on the servers > sending and receiving the phone calls got bogged down before the VoIP core. > - We have dabbled with interrupt moderation in the NIC drivers, but this > has not seemed to help very much. > > Looks interesting: > - Has anyone had success using PF_RING with Direct NIC Access and libzero > from the folks at ntop? Has anyone been able to use this with SIPp or some > other SIP and RTP generator? > > > Many thanks, > > Jon Chleboun