Re: [Freeswitch-users] mod_conference scalability

2009-12-18 Thread Steven Ayre
Brian,

You haven't said what codecs are being used yet. Are the listeners
using a different codec to the speaker? If so, you're potentially
doing transcoding on every single channel, which would make CPU usage
skyrocket.

-Steve


2009/12/17 Anthony Minessale anthony.miness...@gmail.com:
 What exactly is your test process?

 you should try increasing the interval in the conference profile to a bigger
 time slice maybe 30 40 or 60ms
 you could also increase the ptime to match as well.


 like brian said you could use mod_shout to broadcast the single speaker to
 icecast and let people listen with itunes/winamp


 On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 3:41 PM, Brian br...@proximosystems.com wrote:

 I did a test with the trunk version for the one conference case, and it is
 the same results as for 1.0.4. The audio failed at around 300 listeners.
 Oddly though, it consumed less %CPU (240% instead of 300%), and yet the
 audio still failed at the same number of listeners.



 Brian.



 From: Anthony Minessale [mailto:anthony.miness...@gmail.com]
 Sent: Thursday, December 17, 2009 3:49 PM
 To: freeswitch-users@lists.freeswitch.org
 Subject: Re: [Freeswitch-users] mod_conference scalability



 We didn't post it anywhere but we just get overwhelmed with them and many
 of them are unfounded and take up a lot of time to track down.  That does
 not mean you have not found a real problem but the first step is trying
 trunk.


 On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 2:32 PM, Brian br...@proximosystems.com wrote:

 I didn’t realize there was a policy about load testing questions. What
 forum should I have used for this?



 I didn’t get the chance to test on FS trunk yet, but when I do I will
 provide you with the feedback when I do. Just let me know what forum to use
 for this topic from now on.



 Thanks,



 Brian.



 From: Anthony Minessale [mailto:anthony.miness...@gmail.com]
 Sent: Thursday, December 17, 2009 2:42 PM

 To: freeswitch-users@lists.freeswitch.org
 Subject: Re: [Freeswitch-users] mod_conference scalability



 One man's stable release is another man's 6 month old release with
 hundreds of known fixed bugs.
 If one of the core developers tells you to try it, you may as well take
 the time to try it now that you have opened a forum questioning the
 scalability.

 When you tested asterisk did you actually use 600 phones and verify that
 each one can hear the audio perfectly and in time with what the speaker was
 saying?  Did you try same on FS?

 Did you optimize your dialplan on FS to deal with a load test or follow
 any of the recommended performance tuning page.

 All of the answers to these questions are really moot because we have a
 policy against entertaining load testing questions but if you like asterisk,
 by all means, use it, and good luck to you if those numbers you are testing
 at are what you plan to put in real production.

 On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 1:29 PM, Brian br...@proximosystems.com wrote:

 Hi Mike,



 I didn’t get around to testing on the FreeSWITCH trunk yet. Are there
 substantial fixes to mod_conference in the FreeSWITCH trunk that might
 increase capacity for my scenario of one speaker and many listeners? If I
 want to put this into a production environment, I would need a stable
 version, which as far as I know is the 1.0.4 version.



 However, I did test on Asterisk 1.4 using app_conference, and doing the
 same scenario was able to get 1 speaker and 600 listeners on a single
 conference with no audio issues. The CPU at that point was just over 300%,
 same as where the single conference scenario failed on FreeSWITCH with 300
 listeners.  I was able to push it to over 700 listeners before I reached
 400% CPU usage (I guess maxing out my quad-core processors), and asterisk
 finally crashed. But up until that point, there were no audio problems.



 I’ve read a lot about how FreeSWITCH is supposed to be more scalable than
 Asterisk, but unless there is something wrong with my FreeSWITCH setup,
 Asterisk was clearly the winner in this test – more than doubling FreeSWITCH
 capacity in this case. Again, maybe there is something on the FreeSWITCH
 side that I’m doing wrong, but I don’t see what it could be.



 Brian.





 From: Michael Jerris [mailto:m...@jerris.com]
 Sent: Thursday, December 17, 2009 10:18 AM
 To: freeswitch-users@lists.freeswitch.org
 Subject: Re: [Freeswitch-users] mod_conference scalability



 I would be curious what the same tests produce with svn trunk of
 FreeSWITCH.



 Mike



 On Dec 16, 2009, at 4:49 PM, Brian wrote:



 Hi,



 I’m new to FreeSWITCH and I’m testing the scalability of mod_conference to
 see if it will scale better that other solutions. My scenario is to have one
 speaker, and many listeners (mute). Since I have only one speaker, I was
 expecting this to scale well because there is no audio mixing required, just
 send each frame of the single speaker to each listener. Unfortunately, my
 testing was disappointing, and it didn’t scale nearly as well

Re: [Freeswitch-users] mod_conference scalability

2009-12-18 Thread Brian
I've got FS running on a 64 bit OS, and here is more info on the test
procedure.

 

I've got one server (primary) that hosts the speaker call (this is meant to
be a primary conference with a few speakers, but my test simplifies this to
just one speaker). I've got a second server (secondary) that hosts the
conference that all the listeners go into, and I have two other servers that
I use automate the listener calls. The goal is to have several secondary
servers to scale the listener side of things, but for this initial test I've
only got one secondary server.

 

The primary server dials into the secondary conference server so that the
listeners can hear the speaker conference on the primary server.

 

The automated listener servers start dialing into the listener conference at
a combined rate of 5 calls per second (i.e. 2.5 calls per second each). The
play an audio loop that represents noise on their end, which since they are
listeners, should be ignored anyway.

 

As I ramp up the automated listener calls, I manually call into the
conference from either my SIP phone, or from a land line using a DID that I
have directed to the conference.

 

All calls are using SIP with uLaw 8000hz codec. Also, I've set up the
profile for the listener conference to disable many of the events:

 

profile name=listener

  param name=domain value=$${domain}/

  param name=rate value=8000/

  param name=moh-sound value=moh.wav/

  param name=suppress-events
value=start-talking,stop-talking,energy-level,volume-level,gain-level,mute-
detect,energy-level-member,volume-in-member,volume-out-member,lock,unlock,fl
oor-change/

  param name=caller-controls value=listener_controls/

/profile

 

I do have caller controls for the listener, since in my production I will
need to generate and handle events for listener DTMF.

 

To compare FreeSWITCH vs Asterisk, I just swap out the secondary conference
server and everything else stays the same.

 

Brian.

 

From: Brian West [mailto:br...@freeswitch.org] 
Sent: Thursday, December 17, 2009 5:20 PM
To: freeswitch-users@lists.freeswitch.org
Subject: Re: [Freeswitch-users] mod_conference scalability

 

What exactly are you doing I know it goes better than that.. are you using
64bit?

 

/ b

 

On Dec 17, 2009, at 3:41 PM, Brian wrote:





I did a test with the trunk version for the one conference case, and it is
the same results as for 1.0.4. The audio failed at around 300 listeners.
Oddly though, it consumed less %CPU (240% instead of 300%), and yet the
audio still failed at the same number of listeners.

 

Brian.

 

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Re: [Freeswitch-users] mod_conference scalability

2009-12-18 Thread Michael Jerris

What is your dialplan on the secondary box?

On Dec 18, 2009, at 9:08 AM, Brian br...@proximosystems.com wrote:

I’ve got FS running on a 64 bit OS, and here is more info on the tes 
t procedure.




I’ve got one server (primary) that hosts the speaker call (this is m 
eant to be a primary conference with a few speakers, but my test sim 
plifies this to just one speaker). I’ve got a second server (seconda 
ry) that hosts the conference that all the listeners go into, and I  
have two other servers that I use automate the listener calls. The g 
oal is to have several secondary servers to scale the listener side  
of things, but for this initial test I’ve only got one secondary ser 
ver.




The primary server dials into the secondary conference server so  
that the listeners can hear the speaker conference on the primary  
server.




The automated listener servers start dialing into the listener  
conference at a combined rate of 5 calls per second (i.e. 2.5 calls  
per second each). The play an audio loop that represents noise on  
their end, which since they are listeners, should be ignored anyway.




As I ramp up the automated listener calls, I manually call into the  
conference from either my SIP phone, or from a land line using a DID  
that I have directed to the conference.




All calls are using SIP with uLaw 8000hz codec. Also, I’ve set up th 
e profile for the listener conference to disable many of the events:




profile name=listener

  param name=domain value=$${domain}/

  param name=rate value=8000/

  param name=moh-sound value=moh.wav/

  param name=suppress-events value=start-talking,stop- 
talking,energy-level,volume-level,gain-level,mute-detect,energy- 
level-member,volume-in-member,volume-out-member,lock,unlock,floor- 
change/


  param name=caller-controls value=listener_controls/

/profile



I do have caller controls for the listener, since in my production I  
will need to generate and handle events for listener DTMF.




To compare FreeSWITCH vs Asterisk, I just swap out the secondary  
conference server and everything else stays the same.




Brian.



From: Brian West [mailto:br...@freeswitch.org]
Sent: Thursday, December 17, 2009 5:20 PM
To: freeswitch-users@lists.freeswitch.org
Subject: Re: [Freeswitch-users] mod_conference scalability



What exactly are you doing I know it goes better than that.. are you  
using 64bit?




/ b



On Dec 17, 2009, at 3:41 PM, Brian wrote:




I did a test with the trunk version for the one conference case, and  
it is the same results as for 1.0.4. The audio failed at around 300  
listeners. Oddly though, it consumed less %CPU (240% instead of  
300%), and yet the audio still failed at the same number of listeners.




Brian.



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Re: [Freeswitch-users] mod_conference scalability

2009-12-18 Thread François Delawarde
Hearing that Asterisk (1.4) scales 2x like FS is not common, sounds like
a configuration error.

If not, I already see the title of the next Digium blog entry:
FreeSwitch scalability myth finally ends: The worst Asterisk version
ever (1.4) beating the crap of the best and latest FS.

Anyway, you should compare FS trunk to Asterisk 1.6.2 to see who wins
the final conference battle! :-)

François.


On Thu, 2009-12-17 at 16:41 -0500, Brian wrote:
 I did a test with the trunk version for the one conference case, and
 it is the same results as for 1.0.4. The audio failed at around 300
 listeners. Oddly though, it consumed less %CPU (240% instead of 300%),
 and yet the audio still failed at the same number of listeners.
 
  
 
 Brian.
 
  
 
 From: Anthony Minessale [mailto:anthony.miness...@gmail.com] 
 Sent: Thursday, December 17, 2009 3:49 PM
 To: freeswitch-users@lists.freeswitch.org
 Subject: Re: [Freeswitch-users] mod_conference scalability
 
 
  
 
 We didn't post it anywhere but we just get overwhelmed with them and
 many of them are unfounded and take up a lot of time to track down.
 That does not mean you have not found a real problem but the first
 step is trying trunk.
 
 
 
 
 On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 2:32 PM, Brian br...@proximosystems.com
 wrote:
 
 I didn’t realize there was a policy about load testing questions. What
 forum should I have used for this?
 
  
 
 I didn’t get the chance to test on FS trunk yet, but when I do I will
 provide you with the feedback when I do. Just let me know what forum
 to use for this topic from now on.
 
  
 
 Thanks,
 
  
 
 Brian.
 
  
 
 From: Anthony Minessale [mailto:anthony.miness...@gmail.com] 
 Sent: Thursday, December 17, 2009 2:42 PM
 
 
 To: freeswitch-users@lists.freeswitch.org
 Subject: Re: [Freeswitch-users] mod_conference scalability
 
 
  
 
 One man's stable release is another man's 6 month old release with
 hundreds of known fixed bugs.
 If one of the core developers tells you to try it, you may as well
 take the time to try it now that you have opened a forum questioning
 the scalability.
 
 When you tested asterisk did you actually use 600 phones and verify
 that each one can hear the audio perfectly and in time with what the
 speaker was saying?  Did you try same on FS? 
 
 Did you optimize your dialplan on FS to deal with a load test or
 follow any of the recommended performance tuning page.
 
 All of the answers to these questions are really moot because we have
 a policy against entertaining load testing questions but if you like
 asterisk, by all means, use it, and good luck to you if those numbers
 you are testing at are what you plan to put in real
 production.
 
 On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 1:29 PM, Brian br...@proximosystems.com
 wrote:
 
 Hi Mike,
 
  
 
 I didn’t get around to testing on the FreeSWITCH trunk yet. Are there
 substantial fixes to mod_conference in the FreeSWITCH trunk that might
 increase capacity for my scenario of one speaker and many listeners?
 If I want to put this into a production environment, I would need a
 stable version, which as far as I know is the 1.0.4 version.
 
  
 
 However, I did test on Asterisk 1.4 using app_conference, and doing
 the same scenario was able to get 1 speaker and 600 listeners on a
 single conference with no audio issues. The CPU at that point was just
 over 300%, same as where the single conference scenario failed on
 FreeSWITCH with 300 listeners.  I was able to push it to over 700
 listeners before I reached 400% CPU usage (I guess maxing out my
 quad-core processors), and asterisk finally crashed. But up until that
 point, there were no audio problems. 
 
  
 
 I’ve read a lot about how FreeSWITCH is supposed to be more scalable
 than Asterisk, but unless there is something wrong with my FreeSWITCH
 setup, Asterisk was clearly the winner in this test – more than
 doubling FreeSWITCH capacity in this case. Again, maybe there is
 something on the FreeSWITCH side that I’m doing wrong, but I don’t see
 what it could be.
 
  
 
 Brian.
 
  
 
  
 
 From: Michael Jerris [mailto:m...@jerris.com] 
 Sent: Thursday, December 17, 2009 10:18 AM
 To: freeswitch-users@lists.freeswitch.org
 Subject: Re: [Freeswitch-users] mod_conference scalability
 
 
  
 
 I would be curious what the same tests produce with svn trunk of
 FreeSWITCH.
 
  
 
 
 Mike
 
 
  
 
 On Dec 16, 2009, at 4:49 PM, Brian wrote:
 
 
  
 
 Hi,
 
 
  
 
 
 I’m new to FreeSWITCH and I’m testing the scalability of
 mod_conference to see if it will scale better that other solutions. My
 scenario is to have one speaker, and many listeners (mute). Since I
 have only one speaker, I was expecting this to scale well because
 there is no audio mixing required, just send each frame of the single
 speaker to each listener. Unfortunately, my testing was disappointing,
 and it didn’t scale nearly as well as I’d hoped (based on what I’ve
 read on how FreeSWITCH is supposed to be generally very scalable).
 
 
  
 
 
 Here’s my server

Re: [Freeswitch-users] mod_conference scalability

2009-12-18 Thread Anthony Minessale
Conferencing is hardly the best place to judge performance.
Quality is a far more important goal to me in conferencing.

Lets compare who can do 48khz conferences with several 32k siren callers on
a polycom 6000, several more using G722 at 16khz and another handful of
people on g711 ulaw all at different rates and ptimes talking in near-real
time with low delay and low echo.  The fact that you can broadcast the
conferences to icecast, control it from an external application and play
files etc, and oh yeah, it can stream video.

Frankly, considering this is a free software project and so many people
benefit, i would rather focus on quality than what numbers i can get from
having robots call the conference in some way that probably does not match
reality.  I would love for someone to sponsor the effort to add features to
the conference module, but of course, I do not hold my breath, instead I
continue to improve it for free when I find time.  This is one of many
reasons I do not enjoy performance discussions unless I am talking to an
engineer who understands the code or a banker ready to pay for
improvements.  That is not my way of saying pay me or forget it as you can
clearly see the conference module has made it to where it is today with no
financial support at all.  Just the efforts of myself and several brave
volunteers over the years who have contributed to it.

BTW,

We have a weekly call, there is one today in 30 minutes.
Drop by 
sip:8...@conference.freeswitch.orgsip%3a...@conference.freeswitch.orgThis
is just an openVZ instance mind you running at 48khz waiting for
anyone
to call in and say hi.





On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 10:12 AM, François Delawarde 
fdelawa...@wirelessmundi.com wrote:

 Hearing that Asterisk (1.4) scales 2x like FS is not common, sounds like
 a configuration error.

 If not, I already see the title of the next Digium blog entry:
 FreeSwitch scalability myth finally ends: The worst Asterisk version
 ever (1.4) beating the crap of the best and latest FS.

 Anyway, you should compare FS trunk to Asterisk 1.6.2 to see who wins
 the final conference battle! :-)

 François.


 On Thu, 2009-12-17 at 16:41 -0500, Brian wrote:
  I did a test with the trunk version for the one conference case, and
  it is the same results as for 1.0.4. The audio failed at around 300
  listeners. Oddly though, it consumed less %CPU (240% instead of 300%),
  and yet the audio still failed at the same number of listeners.
 
 
 
  Brian.
 
 
 
  From: Anthony Minessale [mailto:anthony.miness...@gmail.com]
  Sent: Thursday, December 17, 2009 3:49 PM
  To: freeswitch-users@lists.freeswitch.org
  Subject: Re: [Freeswitch-users] mod_conference scalability
 
 
 
 
  We didn't post it anywhere but we just get overwhelmed with them and
  many of them are unfounded and take up a lot of time to track down.
  That does not mean you have not found a real problem but the first
  step is trying trunk.
 
 
 
 
  On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 2:32 PM, Brian br...@proximosystems.com
  wrote:
 
  I didn’t realize there was a policy about load testing questions. What
  forum should I have used for this?
 
 
 
  I didn’t get the chance to test on FS trunk yet, but when I do I will
  provide you with the feedback when I do. Just let me know what forum
  to use for this topic from now on.
 
 
 
  Thanks,
 
 
 
  Brian.
 
 
 
  From: Anthony Minessale [mailto:anthony.miness...@gmail.com]
  Sent: Thursday, December 17, 2009 2:42 PM
 
 
  To: freeswitch-users@lists.freeswitch.org
  Subject: Re: [Freeswitch-users] mod_conference scalability
 
 
 
 
  One man's stable release is another man's 6 month old release with
  hundreds of known fixed bugs.
  If one of the core developers tells you to try it, you may as well
  take the time to try it now that you have opened a forum questioning
  the scalability.
 
  When you tested asterisk did you actually use 600 phones and verify
  that each one can hear the audio perfectly and in time with what the
  speaker was saying?  Did you try same on FS?
 
  Did you optimize your dialplan on FS to deal with a load test or
  follow any of the recommended performance tuning page.
 
  All of the answers to these questions are really moot because we have
  a policy against entertaining load testing questions but if you like
  asterisk, by all means, use it, and good luck to you if those numbers
  you are testing at are what you plan to put in real
  production.
 
  On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 1:29 PM, Brian br...@proximosystems.com
  wrote:
 
  Hi Mike,
 
 
 
  I didn’t get around to testing on the FreeSWITCH trunk yet. Are there
  substantial fixes to mod_conference in the FreeSWITCH trunk that might
  increase capacity for my scenario of one speaker and many listeners?
  If I want to put this into a production environment, I would need a
  stable version, which as far as I know is the 1.0.4 version.
 
 
 
  However, I did test on Asterisk 1.4 using app_conference, and doing
  the same scenario was able

Re: [Freeswitch-users] mod_conference scalability

2009-12-18 Thread François Delawarde
It was of course just bad humor, I love both projects for what they are,
and I agree that both have their own advantages and inconvenients.

For example, accessing that same conference from a dahdi card could be
another goal where Asterisk would be at an advantage, as chan_dahdi is
still superior (in the more tested sense) than openzap+mod_openzap.

I just use both projects separately or together depending on what's
needed!

I'm no banker nor do I understand the code, but many thanks for all
those unpaid contributions providing an excellent alternative for free
telephony. Your names really deserve being engraved in google's cache
for eternity. :-)

But still, I would like to see those numbers...

François.


On Fri, 2009-12-18 at 10:34 -0600, Anthony Minessale wrote:
 Conferencing is hardly the best place to judge performance.
 Quality is a far more important goal to me in conferencing.
 
 Lets compare who can do 48khz conferences with several 32k siren
 callers on a polycom 6000, several more using G722 at 16khz and
 another handful of people on g711 ulaw all at different rates and
 ptimes talking in near-real time with low delay and low echo.  The
 fact that you can broadcast the conferences to icecast, control it
 from an external application and play files etc, and oh yeah, it can
 stream video.
 
 Frankly, considering this is a free software project and so many
 people benefit, i would rather focus on quality than what numbers i
 can get from having robots call the conference in some way that
 probably does not match reality.  I would love for someone to sponsor
 the effort to add features to the conference module, but of course, I
 do not hold my breath, instead I continue to improve it for free when
 I find time.  This is one of many reasons I do not enjoy performance
 discussions unless I am talking to an engineer who understands the
 code or a banker ready to pay for improvements.  That is not my way of
 saying pay me or forget it as you can clearly see the conference
 module has made it to where it is today with no financial support at
 all.  Just the efforts of myself and several brave volunteers over the
 years who have contributed to it.
 
 BTW,
 
 We have a weekly call, there is one today in 30 minutes.
 Drop by sip:8...@conference.freeswitch.org This is just an openVZ
 instance mind you running at 48khz waiting for anyone to call in and
 say hi.
 
 
 
 
 
 On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 10:12 AM, François Delawarde
 fdelawa...@wirelessmundi.com wrote:
 Hearing that Asterisk (1.4) scales 2x like FS is not common,
 sounds like
 a configuration error.
 
 If not, I already see the title of the next Digium blog entry:
 FreeSwitch scalability myth finally ends: The worst Asterisk
 version
 ever (1.4) beating the crap of the best and latest FS.
 
 Anyway, you should compare FS trunk to Asterisk 1.6.2 to see
 who wins
 the final conference battle! :-)
 
 François.
 
 
 
 On Thu, 2009-12-17 at 16:41 -0500, Brian wrote:
  I did a test with the trunk version for the one conference
 case, and
  it is the same results as for 1.0.4. The audio failed at
 around 300
  listeners. Oddly though, it consumed less %CPU (240% instead
 of 300%),
  and yet the audio still failed at the same number of
 listeners.
 
 
 
  Brian.
 
 
 
  From: Anthony Minessale [mailto:anthony.miness...@gmail.com]
  Sent: Thursday, December 17, 2009 3:49 PM
  To: freeswitch-users@lists.freeswitch.org
  Subject: Re: [Freeswitch-users] mod_conference scalability
 
 
 
 
  We didn't post it anywhere but we just get overwhelmed with
 them and
  many of them are unfounded and take up a lot of time to
 track down.
  That does not mean you have not found a real problem but the
 first
  step is trying trunk.
 
 
 
 
  On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 2:32 PM, Brian
 br...@proximosystems.com
  wrote:
 
  I didn’t realize there was a policy about load testing
 questions. What
  forum should I have used for this?
 
 
 
  I didn’t get the chance to test on FS trunk yet, but when I
 do I will
  provide you with the feedback when I do. Just let me know
 what forum
  to use for this topic from now on.
 
 
 
  Thanks,
 
 
 
  Brian.
 
 
 
  From: Anthony Minessale [mailto:anthony.miness...@gmail.com]
  Sent: Thursday, December 17, 2009 2:42 PM
 
 
  To: freeswitch-users@lists.freeswitch.org
  Subject: Re

Re: [Freeswitch-users] mod_conference scalability

2009-12-18 Thread Anthony Minessale
yes, I understand.
My reply was to the thread in general not directed at you =p


On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 11:41 AM, François Delawarde 
fdelawa...@wirelessmundi.com wrote:

 It was of course just bad humor, I love both projects for what they are,
 and I agree that both have their own advantages and inconvenients.

 For example, accessing that same conference from a dahdi card could be
 another goal where Asterisk would be at an advantage, as chan_dahdi is
 still superior (in the more tested sense) than openzap+mod_openzap.

 I just use both projects separately or together depending on what's
 needed!

 I'm no banker nor do I understand the code, but many thanks for all
 those unpaid contributions providing an excellent alternative for free
 telephony. Your names really deserve being engraved in google's cache
 for eternity. :-)

 But still, I would like to see those numbers...

 François.


 On Fri, 2009-12-18 at 10:34 -0600, Anthony Minessale wrote:
  Conferencing is hardly the best place to judge performance.
  Quality is a far more important goal to me in conferencing.
 
  Lets compare who can do 48khz conferences with several 32k siren
  callers on a polycom 6000, several more using G722 at 16khz and
  another handful of people on g711 ulaw all at different rates and
  ptimes talking in near-real time with low delay and low echo.  The
  fact that you can broadcast the conferences to icecast, control it
  from an external application and play files etc, and oh yeah, it can
  stream video.
 
  Frankly, considering this is a free software project and so many
  people benefit, i would rather focus on quality than what numbers i
  can get from having robots call the conference in some way that
  probably does not match reality.  I would love for someone to sponsor
  the effort to add features to the conference module, but of course, I
  do not hold my breath, instead I continue to improve it for free when
  I find time.  This is one of many reasons I do not enjoy performance
  discussions unless I am talking to an engineer who understands the
  code or a banker ready to pay for improvements.  That is not my way of
  saying pay me or forget it as you can clearly see the conference
  module has made it to where it is today with no financial support at
  all.  Just the efforts of myself and several brave volunteers over the
  years who have contributed to it.
 
  BTW,
 
  We have a weekly call, there is one today in 30 minutes.
  Drop by 
  sip:8...@conference.freeswitch.orgsip%3a...@conference.freeswitch.orgThis 
  is just an openVZ
  instance mind you running at 48khz waiting for anyone to call in and
  say hi.
 
 
 
 
 
  On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 10:12 AM, François Delawarde
  fdelawa...@wirelessmundi.com wrote:
  Hearing that Asterisk (1.4) scales 2x like FS is not common,
  sounds like
  a configuration error.
 
  If not, I already see the title of the next Digium blog entry:
  FreeSwitch scalability myth finally ends: The worst Asterisk
  version
  ever (1.4) beating the crap of the best and latest FS.
 
  Anyway, you should compare FS trunk to Asterisk 1.6.2 to see
  who wins
  the final conference battle! :-)
 
  François.
 
 
 
  On Thu, 2009-12-17 at 16:41 -0500, Brian wrote:
   I did a test with the trunk version for the one conference
  case, and
   it is the same results as for 1.0.4. The audio failed at
  around 300
   listeners. Oddly though, it consumed less %CPU (240% instead
  of 300%),
   and yet the audio still failed at the same number of
  listeners.
  
  
  
   Brian.
  
  
  
   From: Anthony Minessale [mailto:anthony.miness...@gmail.com]
   Sent: Thursday, December 17, 2009 3:49 PM
   To: freeswitch-users@lists.freeswitch.org
   Subject: Re: [Freeswitch-users] mod_conference scalability
  
  
  
  
   We didn't post it anywhere but we just get overwhelmed with
  them and
   many of them are unfounded and take up a lot of time to
  track down.
   That does not mean you have not found a real problem but the
  first
   step is trying trunk.
  
  
  
  
   On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 2:32 PM, Brian
  br...@proximosystems.com
   wrote:
  
   I didn’t realize there was a policy about load testing
  questions. What
   forum should I have used for this?
  
  
  
   I didn’t get the chance to test on FS trunk yet, but when I
  do I will
   provide you with the feedback when I do. Just let me know
  what forum
   to use for this topic from now on.
  
  
  
   Thanks

Re: [Freeswitch-users] mod_conference scalability

2009-12-18 Thread Brian
I was evaluating the technologies available, and I thought you would be
interested in my results. However, almost every other reply I get from you
to my posts, rather than being helpful, has been hostile and insulting.

 

My scenario is not a hypothetical one of “having robots call the conference
in a way that probably does not match reality”. In fact, this will very much
reflect the reality of the application I’m building. Only instead of 300
listeners, I need to scale to over 2000 listeners minimum – per event, with
possibly more than one concurrent event. I want to pack as many listeners on
one server as I can. I’m trying to find a real solution to a real problem.

 

I work with other open source projects and fund enhancements or fixes I
need. FreeSWITCH would be no different. 

 

Brian.

 

 

From: Anthony Minessale [mailto:anthony.miness...@gmail.com] 
Sent: Friday, December 18, 2009 11:34 AM
To: freeswitch-users@lists.freeswitch.org
Subject: Re: [Freeswitch-users] mod_conference scalability

 

Conferencing is hardly the best place to judge performance.
Quality is a far more important goal to me in conferencing.

Lets compare who can do 48khz conferences with several 32k siren callers on
a polycom 6000, several more using G722 at 16khz and another handful of
people on g711 ulaw all at different rates and ptimes talking in near-real
time with low delay and low echo.  The fact that you can broadcast the
conferences to icecast, control it from an external application and play
files etc, and oh yeah, it can stream video.

Frankly, considering this is a free software project and so many people
benefit, i would rather focus on quality than what numbers i can get from
having robots call the conference in some way that probably does not match
reality.  I would love for someone to sponsor the effort to add features to
the conference module, but of course, I do not hold my breath, instead I
continue to improve it for free when I find time.  This is one of many
reasons I do not enjoy performance discussions unless I am talking to an
engineer who understands the code or a banker ready to pay for improvements.
That is not my way of saying pay me or forget it as you can clearly see the
conference module has made it to where it is today with no financial support
at all.  Just the efforts of myself and several brave volunteers over the
years who have contributed to it.

BTW,

We have a weekly call, there is one today in 30 minutes.
Drop by sip:8...@conference.freeswitch.org
mailto:sip%3a...@conference.freeswitch.org  This is just an openVZ
instance mind you running at 48khz waiting for anyone to call in and say hi.






On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 10:12 AM, François Delawarde
fdelawa...@wirelessmundi.com wrote:

Hearing that Asterisk (1.4) scales 2x like FS is not common, sounds like
a configuration error.

If not, I already see the title of the next Digium blog entry:
FreeSwitch scalability myth finally ends: The worst Asterisk version
ever (1.4) beating the crap of the best and latest FS.

Anyway, you should compare FS trunk to Asterisk 1.6.2 to see who wins
the final conference battle! :-)

François.



On Thu, 2009-12-17 at 16:41 -0500, Brian wrote:
 I did a test with the trunk version for the one conference case, and
 it is the same results as for 1.0.4. The audio failed at around 300
 listeners. Oddly though, it consumed less %CPU (240% instead of 300%),
 and yet the audio still failed at the same number of listeners.



 Brian.



 From: Anthony Minessale [mailto:anthony.miness...@gmail.com]
 Sent: Thursday, December 17, 2009 3:49 PM
 To: freeswitch-users@lists.freeswitch.org
 Subject: Re: [Freeswitch-users] mod_conference scalability




 We didn't post it anywhere but we just get overwhelmed with them and
 many of them are unfounded and take up a lot of time to track down.
 That does not mean you have not found a real problem but the first
 step is trying trunk.




 On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 2:32 PM, Brian br...@proximosystems.com
 wrote:

 I didn’t realize there was a policy about load testing questions. What
 forum should I have used for this?



 I didn’t get the chance to test on FS trunk yet, but when I do I will
 provide you with the feedback when I do. Just let me know what forum
 to use for this topic from now on.



 Thanks,



 Brian.



 From: Anthony Minessale [mailto:anthony.miness...@gmail.com]
 Sent: Thursday, December 17, 2009 2:42 PM


 To: freeswitch-users@lists.freeswitch.org
 Subject: Re: [Freeswitch-users] mod_conference scalability




 One man's stable release is another man's 6 month old release with
 hundreds of known fixed bugs.
 If one of the core developers tells you to try it, you may as well
 take the time to try it now that you have opened a forum questioning
 the scalability.

 When you tested asterisk did you actually use 600 phones and verify
 that each one can hear the audio perfectly and in time with what the
 speaker was saying?  Did you try same on FS?

 Did you

Re: [Freeswitch-users] mod_conference scalability

2009-12-18 Thread Lon Baker

Brian,

Now that you know the scale freeswotch scales to in you scenario, and  
having designed a mult-server solution can you not add more server to  
scale further?


As freeswitch continues to improve retest and revise your architecture  
design.


Sent from my iPhone

On Dec 18, 2009, at 11:14 AM, Brian br...@proximosystems.com wrote:

I was evaluating the technologies available, and I thought you would  
be interested in my results. However, almost every other reply I get  
from you to my posts, rather than being helpful, has been hostile  
and insulting.




My scenario is not a hypothetical one of “having robots call the con 
ference in a way that probably does not match reality”. In fact, thi 
s will very much reflect the reality of the application I’m building 
. Only instead of 300 listeners, I need to scale to over 2000 listen 
ers minimum – per event, with possibly more than one concurrent even 
t. I want to pack as many listeners on one server as I can. I’m tryi 
ng to find a real solution to a real problem.




I work with other open source projects and fund enhancements or  
fixes I need. FreeSWITCH would be no different.




Brian.





From: Anthony Minessale [mailto:anthony.miness...@gmail.com]
Sent: Friday, December 18, 2009 11:34 AM
To: freeswitch-users@lists.freeswitch.org
Subject: Re: [Freeswitch-users] mod_conference scalability



Conferencing is hardly the best place to judge performance.
Quality is a far more important goal to me in conferencing.

Lets compare who can do 48khz conferences with several 32k siren  
callers on a polycom 6000, several more using G722 at 16khz and  
another handful of people on g711 ulaw all at different rates and  
ptimes talking in near-real time with low delay and low echo.  The  
fact that you can broadcast the conferences to icecast, control it  
from an external application and play files etc, and oh yeah, it can  
stream video.


Frankly, considering this is a free software project and so many  
people benefit, i would rather focus on quality than what numbers i  
can get from having robots call the conference in some way that  
probably does not match reality.  I would love for someone to  
sponsor the effort to add features to the conference module, but of  
course, I do not hold my breath, instead I continue to improve it  
for free when I find time.  This is one of many reasons I do not  
enjoy performance discussions unless I am talking to an engineer who  
understands the code or a banker ready to pay for improvements.   
That is not my way of saying pay me or forget it as you can clearly  
see the conference module has made it to where it is today with no  
financial support at all.  Just the efforts of myself and several  
brave volunteers over the years who have contributed to it.


BTW,

We have a weekly call, there is one today in 30 minutes.
Drop by sip:8...@conference.freeswitch.org This is just an openVZ  
instance mind you running at 48khz waiting for anyone to call in and  
say hi.






On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 10:12 AM, François Delawarde fdelawa...@wirelessmundi.co 
m wrote:


Hearing that Asterisk (1.4) scales 2x like FS is not common, sounds  
like

a configuration error.

If not, I already see the title of the next Digium blog entry:
FreeSwitch scalability myth finally ends: The worst Asterisk version
ever (1.4) beating the crap of the best and latest FS.

Anyway, you should compare FS trunk to Asterisk 1.6.2 to see who wins
the final conference battle! :-)

François.



On Thu, 2009-12-17 at 16:41 -0500, Brian wrote:
 I did a test with the trunk version for the one conference case, and
 it is the same results as for 1.0.4. The audio failed at around 300
 listeners. Oddly though, it consumed less %CPU (240% instead of  
300%),

 and yet the audio still failed at the same number of listeners.



 Brian.



 From: Anthony Minessale [mailto:anthony.miness...@gmail.com]
 Sent: Thursday, December 17, 2009 3:49 PM
 To: freeswitch-users@lists.freeswitch.org
 Subject: Re: [Freeswitch-users] mod_conference scalability




 We didn't post it anywhere but we just get overwhelmed with them and
 many of them are unfounded and take up a lot of time to track down.
 That does not mean you have not found a real problem but the first
 step is trying trunk.




 On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 2:32 PM, Brian br...@proximosystems.com
 wrote:

 I didn’t realize there was a policy about load testing questions.  
What

 forum should I have used for this?



 I didn’t get the chance to test on FS trunk yet, but when I do I w 
ill

 provide you with the feedback when I do. Just let me know what forum
 to use for this topic from now on.



 Thanks,



 Brian.



 From: Anthony Minessale [mailto:anthony.miness...@gmail.com]
 Sent: Thursday, December 17, 2009 2:42 PM


 To: freeswitch-users@lists.freeswitch.org
 Subject: Re: [Freeswitch-users] mod_conference scalability




 One man's stable release is another man's 6 month old release with
 hundreds

Re: [Freeswitch-users] mod_conference scalability

2009-12-18 Thread Anthony Minessale
Brian, there was not one insulting word in anything I have said and as this
is a community mailing list my replies are always voiced to address the
public in general not you specifically, like I already mentioned in my last
post.

If you open a public forum on a FAQ be prepared to hear our policy.

Indeed many people do unrealistic load testing and most people with strong
will find it insulting when a group of people have a set of standard policy
by which they try to deal with making a penny jar for all the 2 cents worth
of input we get on a daily basis.  I can't begin to iterate over all the
cases we endure on a weekly basis.

additionally 90% of bug reports are on older releases and we always make
people reproduce their issues on SVN trunk because 3 core devs and a handful
of helpers can't maintain 20 versions of the code.

I gave you some really suggestions yesterday let me repaste it, I fail to
see any insults:

---
What exactly is your test process?

you should try increasing the interval in the conference profile to a bigger
time slice maybe 30 40 or 60ms
you could also increase the ptime to match as well.


like brian said you could use mod_shout to broadcast the single speaker to
icecast and let people listen with itunes/winamp

---

I have to get in these fights with people constantly so I guess that is
part of my job and my biggest mistake is spending so much time trying to
explain myself.



- Show quoted text -




On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 1:33 PM, Michael Collins m...@freeswitch.org wrote:



 On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 11:14 AM, Brian br...@proximosystems.com wrote:

  I was evaluating the technologies available, and I thought you would be
 interested in my results. However, almost every other reply I get from you
 to my posts, rather than being helpful, has been hostile and insulting.

 Thanks for your input. Just so you know, Tony deals with people on a near
 daily basis who want to spend time doing crazy schemes under the guise of
 load testing or researching a new solution which are not grounded in
 reality. At first blush this scenario sounded like one of those schemes.
 However it definitely looks like you've built a test scenario that mimics
 reality better than most. I think we can give you a pass for not being able
 to get 500 people all at once to call in every time you need to test. :)



 My scenario is not a hypothetical one of “having robots call the
 conference in a way that probably does not match reality”. In fact, this
 will very much reflect the reality of the application I’m building. Only
 instead of 300 listeners, I need to scale to over 2000 listeners minimum –
 per event, with possibly more than one concurrent event. I want to pack as
 many listeners on one server as I can. I’m trying to find a real solution to
 a real problem.

 That kind of volume suggests that the icecast style solution would be best.
 It takes much less resources to send audio in one direction than it does to
 mix audio from multiple parties.  I like bkw's initial suggestion of
 transferring a caller to the conference only when he/she needs to speak,
 such as to ask a question. Like Tony mentioned, his focus is on quality not
 quantity, so mod_conference probably isn't the best tool for this scenario.



 I work with other open source projects and fund enhancements or fixes I
 need. FreeSWITCH would be no different.



 Excellent! It looks like we don't already have a canned solution,
 obviously, but as bkw likes to say, all the Lego bricks are there to build
 the solution.  Hop on IRC (#freeswitch in irc.freenode.net) or join the
 weekly conference which is going on right now and you might catch some of
 the devs and leading community members and you can chat in real-time about
 your challenges. (http://wiki.freeswitch.org/wiki/FS_weekly_2009_12_14)

 -Michael


 ___
 FreeSWITCH-users mailing list
 FreeSWITCH-users@lists.freeswitch.org
 http://lists.freeswitch.org/mailman/listinfo/freeswitch-users
 UNSUBSCRIBE:http://lists.freeswitch.org/mailman/options/freeswitch-users
 http://www.freeswitch.org




-- 
Anthony Minessale II

FreeSWITCH http://www.freeswitch.org/
ClueCon http://www.cluecon.com/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/FreeSWITCH_wire

AIM: anthm
MSN:anthony_miness...@hotmail.com msn%3aanthony_miness...@hotmail.com
GTALK/JABBER/PAYPAL:anthony.miness...@gmail.compaypal%3aanthony.miness...@gmail.com
IRC: irc.freenode.net #freeswitch

FreeSWITCH Developer Conference
sip:8...@conference.freeswitch.org sip%3a...@conference.freeswitch.org
iax:gu...@conference.freeswitch.org/888
googletalk:conf+...@conference.freeswitch.orggoogletalk%3aconf%2b...@conference.freeswitch.org

Re: [Freeswitch-users] mod_conference scalability

2009-12-18 Thread Brian
Hi  Michael,

 

Thanks for the invite, but I can't make it on the call. Anyway, I'm not sure
if discussing my specific case is meant for that type of call, is it?

 

After Brian's suggestion to use shoutcast and local streams, I was looking
at the code for those modules. I'm not familiar with shoutcast or icecast
capabilities, so I don't know if they can just pass though my audio stream
unchanged (as uLaw packets). I want to avoid converting from uLaw to mp3 on
the source server, and then back from mp3 to uLaw (or whatever phone codec)
on the other server. 

 

I was wondering if maybe there was a way to make a stream out of an existing
channel, and have all the other channels just listen to that stream. It
would be sort of halfway between conference and shoutcast. I would call in
to the secondary server like I already do, but only instead of entering into
a conference as a speaker, the channel would just start producing a local
audio stream for the listener channels to tap into. It would avoid the need
to have another piece of software to manage (shoutcast or icecast), and my
support team would be happier...

 

However, I would still need to do tests for the streaming idea to see how
that scales...

 

Brian.

 

 

From: Michael Collins [mailto:m...@freeswitch.org] 
Sent: Friday, December 18, 2009 2:33 PM
To: freeswitch-users@lists.freeswitch.org
Subject: Re: [Freeswitch-users] mod_conference scalability

 

 

On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 11:14 AM, Brian br...@proximosystems.com wrote:

I was evaluating the technologies available, and I thought you would be
interested in my results. However, almost every other reply I get from you
to my posts, rather than being helpful, has been hostile and insulting.

Thanks for your input. Just so you know, Tony deals with people on a near
daily basis who want to spend time doing crazy schemes under the guise of
load testing or researching a new solution which are not grounded in
reality. At first blush this scenario sounded like one of those schemes.
However it definitely looks like you've built a test scenario that mimics
reality better than most. I think we can give you a pass for not being able
to get 500 people all at once to call in every time you need to test. :) 

 

My scenario is not a hypothetical one of having robots call the conference
in a way that probably does not match reality. In fact, this will very much
reflect the reality of the application I'm building. Only instead of 300
listeners, I need to scale to over 2000 listeners minimum - per event, with
possibly more than one concurrent event. I want to pack as many listeners on
one server as I can. I'm trying to find a real solution to a real problem.

That kind of volume suggests that the icecast style solution would be best.
It takes much less resources to send audio in one direction than it does to
mix audio from multiple parties.  I like bkw's initial suggestion of
transferring a caller to the conference only when he/she needs to speak,
such as to ask a question. Like Tony mentioned, his focus is on quality not
quantity, so mod_conference probably isn't the best tool for this scenario.

 

I work with other open source projects and fund enhancements or fixes I
need. FreeSWITCH would be no different. 

 

Excellent! It looks like we don't already have a canned solution, obviously,
but as bkw likes to say, all the Lego bricks are there to build the
solution.  Hop on IRC (#freeswitch in irc.freenode.net) or join the weekly
conference which is going on right now and you might catch some of the devs
and leading community members and you can chat in real-time about your
challenges. (http://wiki.freeswitch.org/wiki/FS_weekly_2009_12_14)

-Michael

 

___
FreeSWITCH-users mailing list
FreeSWITCH-users@lists.freeswitch.org
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UNSUBSCRIBE:http://lists.freeswitch.org/mailman/options/freeswitch-users
http://www.freeswitch.org


Re: [Freeswitch-users] mod_conference scalability

2009-12-18 Thread Anthony Minessale
I am more than sure there is probably plenty of room for conference
optimizations it's just a big task.
We don't have a test labbed up and an urgency to work on it.  If you really
want us to pursue trying to improve the performance perhaps you can contact
us at consult...@freeswitch.org and provide us with access your test
environment and let us investigate the possibility of making improvements.




On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 2:16 PM, Brian br...@proximosystems.com wrote:

  Hi  Michael,



 Thanks for the invite, but I can’t make it on the call. Anyway, I’m not
 sure if discussing my specific case is meant for that type of call, is it?



 After Brian’s suggestion to use shoutcast and local streams, I was looking
 at the code for those modules. I’m not familiar with shoutcast or icecast
 capabilities, so I don’t know if they can just pass though my audio stream
 unchanged (as uLaw packets). I want to avoid converting from uLaw to mp3 on
 the source server, and then back from mp3 to uLaw (or whatever phone codec)
 on the other server.



 I was wondering if maybe there was a way to make a stream out of an
 existing channel, and have all the other channels just listen to that
 stream. It would be sort of halfway between conference and shoutcast. I
 would call in to the secondary server like I already do, but only instead of
 entering into a conference as a speaker, the channel would just start
 producing a local audio stream for the listener channels to tap into. It
 would avoid the need to have another piece of software to manage (shoutcast
 or icecast), and my support team would be happier...



 However, I would still need to do tests for the streaming idea to see how
 that scales...



 Brian.





 *From:* Michael Collins [mailto:m...@freeswitch.org]
 *Sent:* Friday, December 18, 2009 2:33 PM

 *To:* freeswitch-users@lists.freeswitch.org
 *Subject:* Re: [Freeswitch-users] mod_conference scalability





 On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 11:14 AM, Brian br...@proximosystems.com wrote:

 I was evaluating the technologies available, and I thought you would be
 interested in my results. However, almost every other reply I get from you
 to my posts, rather than being helpful, has been hostile and insulting.

 Thanks for your input. Just so you know, Tony deals with people on a near
 daily basis who want to spend time doing crazy schemes under the guise of
 load testing or researching a new solution which are not grounded in
 reality. At first blush this scenario sounded like one of those schemes.
 However it definitely looks like you've built a test scenario that mimics
 reality better than most. I think we can give you a pass for not being able
 to get 500 people all at once to call in every time you need to test. :)



 My scenario is not a hypothetical one of “having robots call the conference
 in a way that probably does not match reality”. In fact, this will very much
 reflect the reality of the application I’m building. Only instead of 300
 listeners, I need to scale to over 2000 listeners minimum – per event, with
 possibly more than one concurrent event. I want to pack as many listeners on
 one server as I can. I’m trying to find a real solution to a real problem.

  That kind of volume suggests that the icecast style solution would be
 best. It takes much less resources to send audio in one direction than it
 does to mix audio from multiple parties.  I like bkw's initial suggestion of
 transferring a caller to the conference only when he/she needs to speak,
 such as to ask a question. Like Tony mentioned, his focus is on quality not
 quantity, so mod_conference probably isn't the best tool for this scenario.



 I work with other open source projects and fund enhancements or fixes I
 need. FreeSWITCH would be no different.



  Excellent! It looks like we don't already have a canned solution,
 obviously, but as bkw likes to say, all the Lego bricks are there to build
 the solution.  Hop on IRC (#freeswitch in irc.freenode.net) or join the
 weekly conference which is going on right now and you might catch some of
 the devs and leading community members and you can chat in real-time about
 your challenges. (http://wiki.freeswitch.org/wiki/FS_weekly_2009_12_14)

 -Michael



 ___
 FreeSWITCH-users mailing list
 FreeSWITCH-users@lists.freeswitch.org
 http://lists.freeswitch.org/mailman/listinfo/freeswitch-users
 UNSUBSCRIBE:http://lists.freeswitch.org/mailman/options/freeswitch-users
 http://www.freeswitch.org




-- 
Anthony Minessale II

FreeSWITCH http://www.freeswitch.org/
ClueCon http://www.cluecon.com/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/FreeSWITCH_wire

AIM: anthm
MSN:anthony_miness...@hotmail.com msn%3aanthony_miness...@hotmail.com
GTALK/JABBER/PAYPAL:anthony.miness...@gmail.compaypal%3aanthony.miness...@gmail.com
IRC: irc.freenode.net #freeswitch

FreeSWITCH Developer Conference
sip:8...@conference.freeswitch.org sip%3a...@conference.freeswitch.org
iax:gu

Re: [Freeswitch-users] mod_conference scalability

2009-12-18 Thread David Knell
Hi Brian,

Have a look at this:
http://wiki.freeswitch.org/wiki/Misc._Dialplan_Tools_eavesdrop
- I took a quick look through the code and couldn't see any reason why
you shouldn't have a bunch of eavesdroppers listening to a single
caller.  I'd be surprised if this didn't perform a lot better for your
application.

Cheers --

Dave

 I was evaluating the technologies available, and I thought you would
 be interested in my results. However, almost every other reply I get
 from you to my posts, rather than being helpful, has been hostile and
 insulting.
 
  
 
 My scenario is not a hypothetical one of “having robots call the
 conference in a way that probably does not match reality”. In fact,
 this will very much reflect the reality of the application I’m
 building. Only instead of 300 listeners, I need to scale to over 2000
 listeners minimum – per event, with possibly more than one concurrent
 event. I want to pack as many listeners on one server as I can. I’m
 trying to find a real solution to a real problem.
 
  
 
 I work with other open source projects and fund enhancements or fixes
 I need. FreeSWITCH would be no different. 
 
  
 
 Brian.
 
  
 
  
 
 From: Anthony Minessale [mailto:anthony.miness...@gmail.com] 
 Sent: Friday, December 18, 2009 11:34 AM
 To: freeswitch-users@lists.freeswitch.org
 Subject: Re: [Freeswitch-users] mod_conference scalability
 
 
  
 
 Conferencing is hardly the best place to judge performance.
 Quality is a far more important goal to me in conferencing.
 
 Lets compare who can do 48khz conferences with several 32k siren
 callers on a polycom 6000, several more using G722 at 16khz and
 another handful of people on g711 ulaw all at different rates and
 ptimes talking in near-real time with low delay and low echo.  The
 fact that you can broadcast the conferences to icecast, control it
 from an external application and play files etc, and oh yeah, it can
 stream video.
 
 Frankly, considering this is a free software project and so many
 people benefit, i would rather focus on quality than what numbers i
 can get from having robots call the conference in some way that
 probably does not match reality.  I would love for someone to sponsor
 the effort to add features to the conference module, but of course, I
 do not hold my breath, instead I continue to improve it for free when
 I find time.  This is one of many reasons I do not enjoy performance
 discussions unless I am talking to an engineer who understands the
 code or a banker ready to pay for improvements.  That is not my way of
 saying pay me or forget it as you can clearly see the conference
 module has made it to where it is today with no financial support at
 all.  Just the efforts of myself and several brave volunteers over the
 years who have contributed to it.
 
 BTW,
 
 We have a weekly call, there is one today in 30 minutes.
 Drop by sip:8...@conference.freeswitch.org This is just an openVZ
 instance mind you running at 48khz waiting for anyone to call in and
 say hi.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 10:12 AM, François Delawarde
 fdelawa...@wirelessmundi.com wrote:
 
 Hearing that Asterisk (1.4) scales 2x like FS is not common, sounds
 like
 a configuration error.
 
 If not, I already see the title of the next Digium blog entry:
 FreeSwitch scalability myth finally ends: The worst Asterisk version
 ever (1.4) beating the crap of the best and latest FS.
 
 Anyway, you should compare FS trunk to Asterisk 1.6.2 to see who wins
 the final conference battle! :-)
 
 François.
 
 
 
 On Thu, 2009-12-17 at 16:41 -0500, Brian wrote:
  I did a test with the trunk version for the one conference case, and
  it is the same results as for 1.0.4. The audio failed at around 300
  listeners. Oddly though, it consumed less %CPU (240% instead of
 300%),
  and yet the audio still failed at the same number of listeners.
 
 
 
  Brian.
 
 
 
  From: Anthony Minessale [mailto:anthony.miness...@gmail.com]
  Sent: Thursday, December 17, 2009 3:49 PM
  To: freeswitch-users@lists.freeswitch.org
  Subject: Re: [Freeswitch-users] mod_conference scalability
 
 
 
 
  We didn't post it anywhere but we just get overwhelmed with them and
  many of them are unfounded and take up a lot of time to track down.
  That does not mean you have not found a real problem but the first
  step is trying trunk.
 
 
 
 
  On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 2:32 PM, Brian br...@proximosystems.com
  wrote:
 
  I didn’t realize there was a policy about load testing questions.
 What
  forum should I have used for this?
 
 
 
  I didn’t get the chance to test on FS trunk yet, but when I do I
 will
  provide you with the feedback when I do. Just let me know what forum
  to use for this topic from now on.
 
 
 
  Thanks,
 
 
 
  Brian.
 
 
 
  From: Anthony Minessale [mailto:anthony.miness...@gmail.com]
  Sent: Thursday, December 17, 2009 2:42 PM
 
 
  To: freeswitch-users@lists.freeswitch.org
  Subject: Re: [Freeswitch-users] mod_conference scalability
 
 
 
 
  One man's

Re: [Freeswitch-users] mod_conference scalability

2009-12-18 Thread Brian
Sounds like a plan. We will pursue it through the consult...@freeswith.org
route.

 

Thanks,

 

Brian.

 

From: Anthony Minessale [mailto:anthony.miness...@gmail.com] 
Sent: Friday, December 18, 2009 3:30 PM
To: freeswitch-users@lists.freeswitch.org
Subject: Re: [Freeswitch-users] mod_conference scalability

 

I am more than sure there is probably plenty of room for conference
optimizations it's just a big task.
We don't have a test labbed up and an urgency to work on it.  If you really
want us to pursue trying to improve the performance perhaps you can contact
us at consult...@freeswitch.org and provide us with access your test
environment and let us investigate the possibility of making improvements.

  



On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 2:16 PM, Brian br...@proximosystems.com wrote:

Hi  Michael,

 

Thanks for the invite, but I can't make it on the call. Anyway, I'm not sure
if discussing my specific case is meant for that type of call, is it?

 

After Brian's suggestion to use shoutcast and local streams, I was looking
at the code for those modules. I'm not familiar with shoutcast or icecast
capabilities, so I don't know if they can just pass though my audio stream
unchanged (as uLaw packets). I want to avoid converting from uLaw to mp3 on
the source server, and then back from mp3 to uLaw (or whatever phone codec)
on the other server. 

 

I was wondering if maybe there was a way to make a stream out of an existing
channel, and have all the other channels just listen to that stream. It
would be sort of halfway between conference and shoutcast. I would call in
to the secondary server like I already do, but only instead of entering into
a conference as a speaker, the channel would just start producing a local
audio stream for the listener channels to tap into. It would avoid the need
to have another piece of software to manage (shoutcast or icecast), and my
support team would be happier...

 

However, I would still need to do tests for the streaming idea to see how
that scales...

 

Brian.

 

 

From: Michael Collins [mailto:m...@freeswitch.org] 
Sent: Friday, December 18, 2009 2:33 PM


To: freeswitch-users@lists.freeswitch.org
Subject: Re: [Freeswitch-users] mod_conference scalability

 

 

On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 11:14 AM, Brian br...@proximosystems.com wrote:

I was evaluating the technologies available, and I thought you would be
interested in my results. However, almost every other reply I get from you
to my posts, rather than being helpful, has been hostile and insulting.

Thanks for your input. Just so you know, Tony deals with people on a near
daily basis who want to spend time doing crazy schemes under the guise of
load testing or researching a new solution which are not grounded in
reality. At first blush this scenario sounded like one of those schemes.
However it definitely looks like you've built a test scenario that mimics
reality better than most. I think we can give you a pass for not being able
to get 500 people all at once to call in every time you need to test. :) 

 

My scenario is not a hypothetical one of having robots call the conference
in a way that probably does not match reality. In fact, this will very much
reflect the reality of the application I'm building. Only instead of 300
listeners, I need to scale to over 2000 listeners minimum - per event, with
possibly more than one concurrent event. I want to pack as many listeners on
one server as I can. I'm trying to find a real solution to a real problem.

That kind of volume suggests that the icecast style solution would be best.
It takes much less resources to send audio in one direction than it does to
mix audio from multiple parties.  I like bkw's initial suggestion of
transferring a caller to the conference only when he/she needs to speak,
such as to ask a question. Like Tony mentioned, his focus is on quality not
quantity, so mod_conference probably isn't the best tool for this scenario.

 

I work with other open source projects and fund enhancements or fixes I
need. FreeSWITCH would be no different. 

 

Excellent! It looks like we don't already have a canned solution, obviously,
but as bkw likes to say, all the Lego bricks are there to build the
solution.  Hop on IRC (#freeswitch in irc.freenode.net) or join the weekly
conference which is going on right now and you might catch some of the devs
and leading community members and you can chat in real-time about your
challenges. (http://wiki.freeswitch.org/wiki/FS_weekly_2009_12_14)

-Michael

 


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MSN:anthony_miness...@hotmail.com
mailto:msn

Re: [Freeswitch-users] mod_conference scalability

2009-12-17 Thread Michael Jerris
I would be curious what the same tests produce with svn trunk of FreeSWITCH.

Mike

On Dec 16, 2009, at 4:49 PM, Brian wrote:

 Hi,
  
 I’m new to FreeSWITCH and I’m testing the scalability of mod_conference to 
 see if it will scale better that other solutions. My scenario is to have one 
 speaker, and many listeners (mute). Since I have only one speaker, I was 
 expecting this to scale well because there is no audio mixing required, just 
 send each frame of the single speaker to each listener. Unfortunately, my 
 testing was disappointing, and it didn’t scale nearly as well as I’d hoped 
 (based on what I’ve read on how FreeSWITCH is supposed to be generally very 
 scalable).
  
 Here’s my server setup is this:
  
 FreeSWITCH 1.0.4, 64 bit CentOS 5.3, on a quad-core Xeon server, 4 Gig of 
 RAM. I’ve set file logging to “notice” level. My conference profile is 
 configured to suppress several events, hoping that it would improve 
 performance.
  
 Here are a few scenarios I tested, and roughly where I reached the point of 
 audio failure on the conferences:
  
 Scenario 1:
 1 conference, 1 speaker, audio failed at approx 300 listeners (mute)
  
 Scenario 2:
 4 conferences, 1 speaker per conference, audio failed approx 110 listeners 
 per conference (so just over 400 total channels on the system).
  
 Scenario 3:
 16 conferences, 1 speaker per conference, audio failed at 32 listeners per 
 conference (so just over 500 total channels on the system).
  
  
 Looking at the output from “top”, it seems that in all 3 scenarios, the audio 
 quality failed when the % CPU for the FreeSWITCH process exceeded 300%.
  
 I was hoping maybe someone else might have done similar testing, or maybe has 
 suggestions on how to improve the performance. Or perhaps an alternate 
 solution to the one speaker, many listener case?
  
 Thanks,
  
 Brian.
  
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Re: [Freeswitch-users] mod_conference scalability

2009-12-17 Thread Brian
Hi Mike,

 

I didn't get around to testing on the FreeSWITCH trunk yet. Are there
substantial fixes to mod_conference in the FreeSWITCH trunk that might
increase capacity for my scenario of one speaker and many listeners? If I
want to put this into a production environment, I would need a stable
version, which as far as I know is the 1.0.4 version.

 

However, I did test on Asterisk 1.4 using app_conference, and doing the same
scenario was able to get 1 speaker and 600 listeners on a single conference
with no audio issues. The CPU at that point was just over 300%, same as
where the single conference scenario failed on FreeSWITCH with 300
listeners.  I was able to push it to over 700 listeners before I reached
400% CPU usage (I guess maxing out my quad-core processors), and asterisk
finally crashed. But up until that point, there were no audio problems. 

 

I've read a lot about how FreeSWITCH is supposed to be more scalable than
Asterisk, but unless there is something wrong with my FreeSWITCH setup,
Asterisk was clearly the winner in this test - more than doubling FreeSWITCH
capacity in this case. Again, maybe there is something on the FreeSWITCH
side that I'm doing wrong, but I don't see what it could be.

 

Brian.

 

 

From: Michael Jerris [mailto:m...@jerris.com] 
Sent: Thursday, December 17, 2009 10:18 AM
To: freeswitch-users@lists.freeswitch.org
Subject: Re: [Freeswitch-users] mod_conference scalability

 

I would be curious what the same tests produce with svn trunk of FreeSWITCH.

 

Mike

 

On Dec 16, 2009, at 4:49 PM, Brian wrote:





Hi,

 

I'm new to FreeSWITCH and I'm testing the scalability of mod_conference to
see if it will scale better that other solutions. My scenario is to have one
speaker, and many listeners (mute). Since I have only one speaker, I was
expecting this to scale well because there is no audio mixing required, just
send each frame of the single speaker to each listener. Unfortunately, my
testing was disappointing, and it didn't scale nearly as well as I'd hoped
(based on what I've read on how FreeSWITCH is supposed to be generally very
scalable).

 

Here's my server setup is this:

 

FreeSWITCH 1.0.4, 64 bit CentOS 5.3, on a quad-core Xeon server, 4 Gig of
RAM. I've set file logging to notice level. My conference profile is
configured to suppress several events, hoping that it would improve
performance.

 

Here are a few scenarios I tested, and roughly where I reached the point of
audio failure on the conferences:

 

Scenario 1:

1 conference, 1 speaker, audio failed at approx 300 listeners (mute)

 

Scenario 2:

4 conferences, 1 speaker per conference, audio failed approx 110 listeners
per conference (so just over 400 total channels on the system).

 

Scenario 3:

16 conferences, 1 speaker per conference, audio failed at 32 listeners per
conference (so just over 500 total channels on the system).

 

 

Looking at the output from top, it seems that in all 3 scenarios, the
audio quality failed when the % CPU for the FreeSWITCH process exceeded
300%.

 

I was hoping maybe someone else might have done similar testing, or maybe
has suggestions on how to improve the performance. Or perhaps an alternate
solution to the one speaker, many listener case?

 

Thanks,

 

Brian.

 

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Re: [Freeswitch-users] mod_conference scalability

2009-12-17 Thread Brian West
If you're going to have that many listeners then it would be best to use 
something like shoutcast to broadcast the stream out to a local stream on 
various different boxes... then tie the callers into a stream... when they have 
questions uuid_transfer them into the conf.. then back to the stream when done. 
 This would scale to very large numbers because you could split it out into 
100's of boxes if needed.

/b

On Dec 17, 2009, at 1:29 PM, Brian wrote:

 Hi Mike,
  
 I didn’t get around to testing on the FreeSWITCH trunk yet. Are there 
 substantial fixes to mod_conference in the FreeSWITCH trunk that might 
 increase capacity for my scenario of one speaker and many listeners? If I 
 want to put this into a production environment, I would need a stable 
 version, which as far as I know is the 1.0.4 version.
  
 However, I did test on Asterisk 1.4 using app_conference, and doing the same 
 scenario was able to get 1 speaker and 600 listeners on a single conference 
 with no audio issues. The CPU at that point was just over 300%, same as where 
 the single conference scenario failed on FreeSWITCH with 300 listeners.  I 
 was able to push it to over 700 listeners before I reached 400% CPU usage (I 
 guess maxing out my quad-core processors), and asterisk finally crashed. But 
 up until that point, there were no audio problems.
  
 I’ve read a lot about how FreeSWITCH is supposed to be more scalable than 
 Asterisk, but unless there is something wrong with my FreeSWITCH setup, 
 Asterisk was clearly the winner in this test – more than doubling FreeSWITCH 
 capacity in this case. Again, maybe there is something on the FreeSWITCH side 
 that I’m doing wrong, but I don’t see what it could be.
  
 Brian.
  

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Re: [Freeswitch-users] mod_conference scalability

2009-12-17 Thread Anthony Minessale
One man's stable release is another man's 6 month old release with hundreds
of known fixed bugs.
If one of the core developers tells you to try it, you may as well take the
time to try it now that you have opened a forum questioning the scalability.

When you tested asterisk did you actually use 600 phones and verify that
each one can hear the audio perfectly and in time with what the speaker was
saying?  Did you try same on FS?

Did you optimize your dialplan on FS to deal with a load test or follow any
of the recommended performance tuning page.

All of the answers to these questions are really moot because we have a
policy against entertaining load testing questions but if you like asterisk,
by all means, use it, and good luck to you if those numbers you are testing
at are what you plan to put in real production.


On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 1:29 PM, Brian br...@proximosystems.com wrote:

  Hi Mike,



 I didn’t get around to testing on the FreeSWITCH trunk yet. Are there
 substantial fixes to mod_conference in the FreeSWITCH trunk that might
 increase capacity for my scenario of one speaker and many listeners? If I
 want to put this into a production environment, I would need a stable
 version, which as far as I know is the 1.0.4 version.



 However, I did test on Asterisk 1.4 using app_conference, and doing the
 same scenario was able to get 1 speaker and 600 listeners on a single
 conference with no audio issues. The CPU at that point was just over 300%,
 same as where the single conference scenario failed on FreeSWITCH with 300
 listeners.  I was able to push it to over 700 listeners before I reached
 400% CPU usage (I guess maxing out my quad-core processors), and asterisk
 finally crashed. But up until that point, there were no audio problems.



 I’ve read a lot about how FreeSWITCH is supposed to be more scalable than
 Asterisk, but unless there is something wrong with my FreeSWITCH setup,
 Asterisk was clearly the winner in this test – more than doubling FreeSWITCH
 capacity in this case. Again, maybe there is something on the FreeSWITCH
 side that I’m doing wrong, but I don’t see what it could be.



 Brian.





 *From:* Michael Jerris [mailto:m...@jerris.com]
 *Sent:* Thursday, December 17, 2009 10:18 AM
 *To:* freeswitch-users@lists.freeswitch.org
 *Subject:* Re: [Freeswitch-users] mod_conference scalability



 I would be curious what the same tests produce with svn trunk of
 FreeSWITCH.



 Mike



 On Dec 16, 2009, at 4:49 PM, Brian wrote:



   Hi,



 I’m new to FreeSWITCH and I’m testing the scalability of mod_conference to
 see if it will scale better that other solutions. My scenario is to have one
 speaker, and many listeners (mute). Since I have only one speaker, I was
 expecting this to scale well because there is no audio mixing required, just
 send each frame of the single speaker to each listener. Unfortunately, my
 testing was disappointing, and it didn’t scale nearly as well as I’d hoped
 (based on what I’ve read on how FreeSWITCH is supposed to be generally very
 scalable).



 Here’s my server setup is this:



 FreeSWITCH 1.0.4, 64 bit CentOS 5.3, on a quad-core Xeon server, 4 Gig of
 RAM. I’ve set file logging to “notice” level. My conference profile is
 configured to suppress several events, hoping that it would improve
 performance.



 Here are a few scenarios I tested, and roughly where I reached the point of
 audio failure on the conferences:



 Scenario 1:

 1 conference, 1 speaker, audio failed at approx 300 listeners (mute)



 Scenario 2:

 4 conferences, 1 speaker per conference, audio failed approx 110 listeners
 per conference (so just over 400 total channels on the system).



 Scenario 3:

 16 conferences, 1 speaker per conference, audio failed at 32 listeners per
 conference (so just over 500 total channels on the system).





 Looking at the output from “top”, it seems that in all 3 scenarios, the
 audio quality failed when the % CPU for the FreeSWITCH process exceeded
 300%.



 I was hoping maybe someone else might have done similar testing, or maybe
 has suggestions on how to improve the performance. Or perhaps an alternate
 solution to the one speaker, many listener case?



 Thanks,



 Brian.



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FreeSWITCH http://www.freeswitch.org/
ClueCon http://www.cluecon.com/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/FreeSWITCH_wire

AIM: anthm
MSN:anthony_miness...@hotmail.com

Re: [Freeswitch-users] mod_conference scalability

2009-12-17 Thread Michael Jerris
We are always doing enhancements and yes there are some real scalability 
enhancements in trunk compared to 1.0.4, I am just not sure if they effect 
conference significantly or not.  I would guess that trunk is actually more 
stable than 1.0.4 at the moment.  Give it a try and find out.

Mike

On Dec 17, 2009, at 2:29 PM, Brian wrote:

 Hi Mike,
  
 I didn’t get around to testing on the FreeSWITCH trunk yet. Are there 
 substantial fixes to mod_conference in the FreeSWITCH trunk that might 
 increase capacity for my scenario of one speaker and many listeners? If I 
 want to put this into a production environment, I would need a stable 
 version, which as far as I know is the 1.0.4 version.
  
 However, I did test on Asterisk 1.4 using app_conference, and doing the same 
 scenario was able to get 1 speaker and 600 listeners on a single conference 
 with no audio issues. The CPU at that point was just over 300%, same as where 
 the single conference scenario failed on FreeSWITCH with 300 listeners.  I 
 was able to push it to over 700 listeners before I reached 400% CPU usage (I 
 guess maxing out my quad-core processors), and asterisk finally crashed. But 
 up until that point, there were no audio problems.
  
 I’ve read a lot about how FreeSWITCH is supposed to be more scalable than 
 Asterisk, but unless there is something wrong with my FreeSWITCH setup, 
 Asterisk was clearly the winner in this test – more than doubling FreeSWITCH 
 capacity in this case. Again, maybe there is something on the FreeSWITCH side 
 that I’m doing wrong, but I don’t see what it could be.
  
 Brian.
  
  
 From: Michael Jerris [mailto:m...@jerris.com] 
 Sent: Thursday, December 17, 2009 10:18 AM
 To: freeswitch-users@lists.freeswitch.org
 Subject: Re: [Freeswitch-users] mod_conference scalability
  
 I would be curious what the same tests produce with svn trunk of FreeSWITCH.
  
 Mike
  
 On Dec 16, 2009, at 4:49 PM, Brian wrote:
 
 
 Hi,
  
 I’m new to FreeSWITCH and I’m testing the scalability of mod_conference to 
 see if it will scale better that other solutions. My scenario is to have one 
 speaker, and many listeners (mute). Since I have only one speaker, I was 
 expecting this to scale well because there is no audio mixing required, just 
 send each frame of the single speaker to each listener. Unfortunately, my 
 testing was disappointing, and it didn’t scale nearly as well as I’d hoped 
 (based on what I’ve read on how FreeSWITCH is supposed to be generally very 
 scalable).
  
 Here’s my server setup is this:
  
 FreeSWITCH 1.0.4, 64 bit CentOS 5.3, on a quad-core Xeon server, 4 Gig of 
 RAM. I’ve set file logging to “notice” level. My conference profile is 
 configured to suppress several events, hoping that it would improve 
 performance.
  
 Here are a few scenarios I tested, and roughly where I reached the point of 
 audio failure on the conferences:
  
 Scenario 1:
 1 conference, 1 speaker, audio failed at approx 300 listeners (mute)
  
 Scenario 2:
 4 conferences, 1 speaker per conference, audio failed approx 110 listeners 
 per conference (so just over 400 total channels on the system).
  
 Scenario 3:
 16 conferences, 1 speaker per conference, audio failed at 32 listeners per 
 conference (so just over 500 total channels on the system).
  
  
 Looking at the output from “top”, it seems that in all 3 scenarios, the audio 
 quality failed when the % CPU for the FreeSWITCH process exceeded 300%.
  
 I was hoping maybe someone else might have done similar testing, or maybe has 
 suggestions on how to improve the performance. Or perhaps an alternate 
 solution to the one speaker, many listener case?
  
 Thanks,
  
 Brian.
  
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Re: [Freeswitch-users] mod_conference scalability

2009-12-17 Thread Brian West
Yes, while it is true that does make a profound difference but if he has many 
listeners and not very many talkers... just tapping into the conference and 
streaming that audio out would scale well.  

/b

On Dec 17, 2009, at 1:50 PM, Steve Underwood wrote:

 I don't think you have mentioned which codecs are involved. This can 
 have a profound effect.
 
 Steve


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Re: [Freeswitch-users] mod_conference scalability

2009-12-17 Thread Brian
I didn't realize there was a policy about load testing questions. What forum
should I have used for this?

 

I didn't get the chance to test on FS trunk yet, but when I do I will
provide you with the feedback when I do. Just let me know what forum to use
for this topic from now on.

 

Thanks,

 

Brian.

 

From: Anthony Minessale [mailto:anthony.miness...@gmail.com] 
Sent: Thursday, December 17, 2009 2:42 PM
To: freeswitch-users@lists.freeswitch.org
Subject: Re: [Freeswitch-users] mod_conference scalability

 

One man's stable release is another man's 6 month old release with hundreds
of known fixed bugs.
If one of the core developers tells you to try it, you may as well take the
time to try it now that you have opened a forum questioning the scalability.

When you tested asterisk did you actually use 600 phones and verify that
each one can hear the audio perfectly and in time with what the speaker was
saying?  Did you try same on FS? 

Did you optimize your dialplan on FS to deal with a load test or follow any
of the recommended performance tuning page.

All of the answers to these questions are really moot because we have a
policy against entertaining load testing questions but if you like asterisk,
by all means, use it, and good luck to you if those numbers you are testing
at are what you plan to put in real production.



On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 1:29 PM, Brian br...@proximosystems.com wrote:

Hi Mike,

 

I didn't get around to testing on the FreeSWITCH trunk yet. Are there
substantial fixes to mod_conference in the FreeSWITCH trunk that might
increase capacity for my scenario of one speaker and many listeners? If I
want to put this into a production environment, I would need a stable
version, which as far as I know is the 1.0.4 version.

 

However, I did test on Asterisk 1.4 using app_conference, and doing the same
scenario was able to get 1 speaker and 600 listeners on a single conference
with no audio issues. The CPU at that point was just over 300%, same as
where the single conference scenario failed on FreeSWITCH with 300
listeners.  I was able to push it to over 700 listeners before I reached
400% CPU usage (I guess maxing out my quad-core processors), and asterisk
finally crashed. But up until that point, there were no audio problems. 

 

I've read a lot about how FreeSWITCH is supposed to be more scalable than
Asterisk, but unless there is something wrong with my FreeSWITCH setup,
Asterisk was clearly the winner in this test - more than doubling FreeSWITCH
capacity in this case. Again, maybe there is something on the FreeSWITCH
side that I'm doing wrong, but I don't see what it could be.

 

Brian.

 

 

From: Michael Jerris [mailto:m...@jerris.com] 
Sent: Thursday, December 17, 2009 10:18 AM
To: freeswitch-users@lists.freeswitch.org
Subject: Re: [Freeswitch-users] mod_conference scalability

 

I would be curious what the same tests produce with svn trunk of FreeSWITCH.

 

Mike

 

On Dec 16, 2009, at 4:49 PM, Brian wrote:

 

Hi,

 

I'm new to FreeSWITCH and I'm testing the scalability of mod_conference to
see if it will scale better that other solutions. My scenario is to have one
speaker, and many listeners (mute). Since I have only one speaker, I was
expecting this to scale well because there is no audio mixing required, just
send each frame of the single speaker to each listener. Unfortunately, my
testing was disappointing, and it didn't scale nearly as well as I'd hoped
(based on what I've read on how FreeSWITCH is supposed to be generally very
scalable).

 

Here's my server setup is this:

 

FreeSWITCH 1.0.4, 64 bit CentOS 5.3, on a quad-core Xeon server, 4 Gig of
RAM. I've set file logging to notice level. My conference profile is
configured to suppress several events, hoping that it would improve
performance.

 

Here are a few scenarios I tested, and roughly where I reached the point of
audio failure on the conferences:

 

Scenario 1:

1 conference, 1 speaker, audio failed at approx 300 listeners (mute)

 

Scenario 2:

4 conferences, 1 speaker per conference, audio failed approx 110 listeners
per conference (so just over 400 total channels on the system).

 

Scenario 3:

16 conferences, 1 speaker per conference, audio failed at 32 listeners per
conference (so just over 500 total channels on the system).

 

 

Looking at the output from top, it seems that in all 3 scenarios, the
audio quality failed when the % CPU for the FreeSWITCH process exceeded
300%.

 

I was hoping maybe someone else might have done similar testing, or maybe
has suggestions on how to improve the performance. Or perhaps an alternate
solution to the one speaker, many listener case?

 

Thanks,

 

Brian.

 

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Re: [Freeswitch-users] mod_conference scalability

2009-12-17 Thread Anthony Minessale
We didn't post it anywhere but we just get overwhelmed with them and many of
them are unfounded and take up a lot of time to track down.  That does not
mean you have not found a real problem but the first step is trying trunk.



On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 2:32 PM, Brian br...@proximosystems.com wrote:

  I didn’t realize there was a policy about load testing questions. What
 forum should I have used for this?



 I didn’t get the chance to test on FS trunk yet, but when I do I will
 provide you with the feedback when I do. Just let me know what forum to use
 for this topic from now on.



 Thanks,



 Brian.



 *From:* Anthony Minessale [mailto:anthony.miness...@gmail.com]
 *Sent:* Thursday, December 17, 2009 2:42 PM

 *To:* freeswitch-users@lists.freeswitch.org
 *Subject:* Re: [Freeswitch-users] mod_conference scalability



 One man's stable release is another man's 6 month old release with hundreds
 of known fixed bugs.
 If one of the core developers tells you to try it, you may as well take the
 time to try it now that you have opened a forum questioning the scalability.

 When you tested asterisk did you actually use 600 phones and verify that
 each one can hear the audio perfectly and in time with what the speaker was
 saying?  Did you try same on FS?

 Did you optimize your dialplan on FS to deal with a load test or follow any
 of the recommended performance tuning page.

 All of the answers to these questions are really moot because we have a
 policy against entertaining load testing questions but if you like asterisk,
 by all means, use it, and good luck to you if those numbers you are testing
 at are what you plan to put in real production.

  On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 1:29 PM, Brian br...@proximosystems.com wrote:

 Hi Mike,



 I didn’t get around to testing on the FreeSWITCH trunk yet. Are there
 substantial fixes to mod_conference in the FreeSWITCH trunk that might
 increase capacity for my scenario of one speaker and many listeners? If I
 want to put this into a production environment, I would need a stable
 version, which as far as I know is the 1.0.4 version.



 However, I did test on Asterisk 1.4 using app_conference, and doing the
 same scenario was able to get 1 speaker and 600 listeners on a single
 conference with no audio issues. The CPU at that point was just over 300%,
 same as where the single conference scenario failed on FreeSWITCH with 300
 listeners.  I was able to push it to over 700 listeners before I reached
 400% CPU usage (I guess maxing out my quad-core processors), and asterisk
 finally crashed. But up until that point, there were no audio problems.



 I’ve read a lot about how FreeSWITCH is supposed to be more scalable than
 Asterisk, but unless there is something wrong with my FreeSWITCH setup,
 Asterisk was clearly the winner in this test – more than doubling FreeSWITCH
 capacity in this case. Again, maybe there is something on the FreeSWITCH
 side that I’m doing wrong, but I don’t see what it could be.



 Brian.





 *From:* Michael Jerris [mailto:m...@jerris.com]
 *Sent:* Thursday, December 17, 2009 10:18 AM
 *To:* freeswitch-users@lists.freeswitch.org
 *Subject:* Re: [Freeswitch-users] mod_conference scalability



 I would be curious what the same tests produce with svn trunk of
 FreeSWITCH.



 Mike



 On Dec 16, 2009, at 4:49 PM, Brian wrote:



 Hi,



 I’m new to FreeSWITCH and I’m testing the scalability of mod_conference to
 see if it will scale better that other solutions. My scenario is to have one
 speaker, and many listeners (mute). Since I have only one speaker, I was
 expecting this to scale well because there is no audio mixing required, just
 send each frame of the single speaker to each listener. Unfortunately, my
 testing was disappointing, and it didn’t scale nearly as well as I’d hoped
 (based on what I’ve read on how FreeSWITCH is supposed to be generally very
 scalable).



 Here’s my server setup is this:



 FreeSWITCH 1.0.4, 64 bit CentOS 5.3, on a quad-core Xeon server, 4 Gig of
 RAM. I’ve set file logging to “notice” level. My conference profile is
 configured to suppress several events, hoping that it would improve
 performance.



 Here are a few scenarios I tested, and roughly where I reached the point of
 audio failure on the conferences:



 Scenario 1:

 1 conference, 1 speaker, audio failed at approx 300 listeners (mute)



 Scenario 2:

 4 conferences, 1 speaker per conference, audio failed approx 110 listeners
 per conference (so just over 400 total channels on the system).



 Scenario 3:

 16 conferences, 1 speaker per conference, audio failed at 32 listeners per
 conference (so just over 500 total channels on the system).





 Looking at the output from “top”, it seems that in all 3 scenarios, the
 audio quality failed when the % CPU for the FreeSWITCH process exceeded
 300%.



 I was hoping maybe someone else might have done similar testing, or maybe
 has suggestions on how to improve the performance. Or perhaps

Re: [Freeswitch-users] mod_conference scalability

2009-12-17 Thread David Knell
Hi Brian,

I imagine that one of the issues is that you're using a complex
sledgehammer (mod_conference) to crack a simple nut - that of having
multiple listeners listening to a single speaker.

As far as I am aware, FreeSWITCH doesn't have anything built in which
will allow this kind of simple audio path switching - maybe someone more
knowledgeable than me will correct me if I'm wrong?

I presented some stuff at ClueCon which would address this kind of
simple application and ought to scale well beyond what you've seen with
FS or Asterisk.  It's still pretty basic [I'd do more with it if I
wasn't so busy joshing with the other Brian on Facebook], and has never
been deployed in anger but, if you're interested, drop me a note
off-list.

--Dave

 I didn’t realize there was a policy about load testing questions. What
 forum should I have used for this?
 
  
 
 I didn’t get the chance to test on FS trunk yet, but when I do I will
 provide you with the feedback when I do. Just let me know what forum
 to use for this topic from now on.
 
  
 
 Thanks,
 
  
 
 Brian.
 
  
 
 From: Anthony Minessale [mailto:anthony.miness...@gmail.com] 
 Sent: Thursday, December 17, 2009 2:42 PM
 To: freeswitch-users@lists.freeswitch.org
 Subject: Re: [Freeswitch-users] mod_conference scalability
 
 
  
 
 One man's stable release is another man's 6 month old release with
 hundreds of known fixed bugs.
 If one of the core developers tells you to try it, you may as well
 take the time to try it now that you have opened a forum questioning
 the scalability.
 
 When you tested asterisk did you actually use 600 phones and verify
 that each one can hear the audio perfectly and in time with what the
 speaker was saying?  Did you try same on FS? 
 
 Did you optimize your dialplan on FS to deal with a load test or
 follow any of the recommended performance tuning page.
 
 All of the answers to these questions are really moot because we have
 a policy against entertaining load testing questions but if you like
 asterisk, by all means, use it, and good luck to you if those numbers
 you are testing at are what you plan to put in real
 production.
 
 
 
 On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 1:29 PM, Brian br...@proximosystems.com
 wrote:
 
 Hi Mike,
 
  
 
 I didn’t get around to testing on the FreeSWITCH trunk yet. Are there
 substantial fixes to mod_conference in the FreeSWITCH trunk that might
 increase capacity for my scenario of one speaker and many listeners?
 If I want to put this into a production environment, I would need a
 stable version, which as far as I know is the 1.0.4 version.
 
  
 
 However, I did test on Asterisk 1.4 using app_conference, and doing
 the same scenario was able to get 1 speaker and 600 listeners on a
 single conference with no audio issues. The CPU at that point was just
 over 300%, same as where the single conference scenario failed on
 FreeSWITCH with 300 listeners.  I was able to push it to over 700
 listeners before I reached 400% CPU usage (I guess maxing out my
 quad-core processors), and asterisk finally crashed. But up until that
 point, there were no audio problems. 
 
  
 
 I’ve read a lot about how FreeSWITCH is supposed to be more scalable
 than Asterisk, but unless there is something wrong with my FreeSWITCH
 setup, Asterisk was clearly the winner in this test – more than
 doubling FreeSWITCH capacity in this case. Again, maybe there is
 something on the FreeSWITCH side that I’m doing wrong, but I don’t see
 what it could be.
 
  
 
 Brian.
 
  
 
  
 
 From: Michael Jerris [mailto:m...@jerris.com] 
 Sent: Thursday, December 17, 2009 10:18 AM
 To: freeswitch-users@lists.freeswitch.org
 Subject: Re: [Freeswitch-users] mod_conference scalability
 
 
  
 
 I would be curious what the same tests produce with svn trunk of
 FreeSWITCH.
 
  
 
 
 Mike
 
 
  
 
 On Dec 16, 2009, at 4:49 PM, Brian wrote:
 
 
  
 
 Hi,
 
 
  
 
 
 I’m new to FreeSWITCH and I’m testing the scalability of
 mod_conference to see if it will scale better that other solutions. My
 scenario is to have one speaker, and many listeners (mute). Since I
 have only one speaker, I was expecting this to scale well because
 there is no audio mixing required, just send each frame of the single
 speaker to each listener. Unfortunately, my testing was disappointing,
 and it didn’t scale nearly as well as I’d hoped (based on what I’ve
 read on how FreeSWITCH is supposed to be generally very scalable).
 
 
  
 
 
 Here’s my server setup is this:
 
 
  
 
 
 FreeSWITCH 1.0.4, 64 bit CentOS 5.3, on a quad-core Xeon server, 4 Gig
 of RAM. I’ve set file logging to “notice” level. My conference profile
 is configured to suppress several events, hoping that it would improve
 performance.
 
 
  
 
 
 Here are a few scenarios I tested, and roughly where I reached the
 point of audio failure on the conferences:
 
 
  
 
 
 Scenario 1:
 
 
 1 conference, 1 speaker, audio failed at approx 300 listeners (mute)
 
 
  
 
 
 Scenario 2:
 
 
 4 conferences, 1

Re: [Freeswitch-users] mod_conference scalability

2009-12-17 Thread Brian West
What exactly are you doing I know it goes better than that.. are you using 
64bit?

/ b

On Dec 17, 2009, at 3:41 PM, Brian wrote:

 I did a test with the trunk version for the one conference case, and it is 
 the same results as for 1.0.4. The audio failed at around 300 listeners. 
 Oddly though, it consumed less %CPU (240% instead of 300%), and yet the audio 
 still failed at the same number of listeners.
  
 Brian.

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Re: [Freeswitch-users] mod_conference scalability

2009-12-17 Thread Anthony Minessale
What exactly is your test process?

you should try increasing the interval in the conference profile to a bigger
time slice maybe 30 40 or 60ms
you could also increase the ptime to match as well.


like brian said you could use mod_shout to broadcast the single speaker to
icecast and let people listen with itunes/winamp


On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 3:41 PM, Brian br...@proximosystems.com wrote:

  I did a test with the trunk version for the one conference case, and it
 is the same results as for 1.0.4. The audio failed at around 300 listeners.
 Oddly though, it consumed less %CPU (240% instead of 300%), and yet the
 audio still failed at the same number of listeners.



 Brian.



 *From:* Anthony Minessale [mailto:anthony.miness...@gmail.com]
 *Sent:* Thursday, December 17, 2009 3:49 PM

 *To:* freeswitch-users@lists.freeswitch.org
 *Subject:* Re: [Freeswitch-users] mod_conference scalability



 We didn't post it anywhere but we just get overwhelmed with them and many
 of them are unfounded and take up a lot of time to track down.  That does
 not mean you have not found a real problem but the first step is trying
 trunk.


  On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 2:32 PM, Brian br...@proximosystems.com wrote:

 I didn’t realize there was a policy about load testing questions. What
 forum should I have used for this?



 I didn’t get the chance to test on FS trunk yet, but when I do I will
 provide you with the feedback when I do. Just let me know what forum to use
 for this topic from now on.



 Thanks,



 Brian.



 *From:* Anthony Minessale [mailto:anthony.miness...@gmail.com]
 *Sent:* Thursday, December 17, 2009 2:42 PM


 *To:* freeswitch-users@lists.freeswitch.org
 *Subject:* Re: [Freeswitch-users] mod_conference scalability



 One man's stable release is another man's 6 month old release with hundreds
 of known fixed bugs.
 If one of the core developers tells you to try it, you may as well take the
 time to try it now that you have opened a forum questioning the scalability.

 When you tested asterisk did you actually use 600 phones and verify that
 each one can hear the audio perfectly and in time with what the speaker was
 saying?  Did you try same on FS?

 Did you optimize your dialplan on FS to deal with a load test or follow any
 of the recommended performance tuning page.

 All of the answers to these questions are really moot because we have a
 policy against entertaining load testing questions but if you like asterisk,
 by all means, use it, and good luck to you if those numbers you are testing
 at are what you plan to put in real production.

 On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 1:29 PM, Brian br...@proximosystems.com wrote:

 Hi Mike,



 I didn’t get around to testing on the FreeSWITCH trunk yet. Are there
 substantial fixes to mod_conference in the FreeSWITCH trunk that might
 increase capacity for my scenario of one speaker and many listeners? If I
 want to put this into a production environment, I would need a stable
 version, which as far as I know is the 1.0.4 version.



 However, I did test on Asterisk 1.4 using app_conference, and doing the
 same scenario was able to get 1 speaker and 600 listeners on a single
 conference with no audio issues. The CPU at that point was just over 300%,
 same as where the single conference scenario failed on FreeSWITCH with 300
 listeners.  I was able to push it to over 700 listeners before I reached
 400% CPU usage (I guess maxing out my quad-core processors), and asterisk
 finally crashed. But up until that point, there were no audio problems.



 I’ve read a lot about how FreeSWITCH is supposed to be more scalable than
 Asterisk, but unless there is something wrong with my FreeSWITCH setup,
 Asterisk was clearly the winner in this test – more than doubling FreeSWITCH
 capacity in this case. Again, maybe there is something on the FreeSWITCH
 side that I’m doing wrong, but I don’t see what it could be.



 Brian.





 *From:* Michael Jerris [mailto:m...@jerris.com]
 *Sent:* Thursday, December 17, 2009 10:18 AM
 *To:* freeswitch-users@lists.freeswitch.org
 *Subject:* Re: [Freeswitch-users] mod_conference scalability



 I would be curious what the same tests produce with svn trunk of
 FreeSWITCH.



 Mike



 On Dec 16, 2009, at 4:49 PM, Brian wrote:



 Hi,



 I’m new to FreeSWITCH and I’m testing the scalability of mod_conference to
 see if it will scale better that other solutions. My scenario is to have one
 speaker, and many listeners (mute). Since I have only one speaker, I was
 expecting this to scale well because there is no audio mixing required, just
 send each frame of the single speaker to each listener. Unfortunately, my
 testing was disappointing, and it didn’t scale nearly as well as I’d hoped
 (based on what I’ve read on how FreeSWITCH is supposed to be generally very
 scalable).



 Here’s my server setup is this:



 FreeSWITCH 1.0.4, 64 bit CentOS 5.3, on a quad-core Xeon server, 4 Gig of
 RAM. I’ve set file logging to “notice” level. My