An Asterisk Milestone – Shove 10,000 simultaneous calls onto a single Open Source machine!
August 28th, 2009 | Published in Asterisk, Uncategorized | 3 Comments
Recently Olle E Johansson posted some details about how he managed to get 10,000 simultaneous calls out of a single Asterisk server. As far as I’m aware, this is the largest number of simultaneous calls documented on a single Asterisk based server, so congrats Olle… I hope you enjoy that bottle of wine!
Now who says you can’t get more than 250 calls on a single Asterisk server??? I’ve always known that with the right setup and configuration you could get at least 2,000 calls on a single Asterisk server… but 10,000 is a remarkable milestone. It’s news like this that further validates the significance Asterisk and even other open source VoIP software plays in the world of carrier communications. If I were a company like Cisco or Sonus, I’d pay very close attention to all this.
Now yes, 10,000 calls is a lot.. but it is inevitable and as Asterisk continues to evolve, its ability to handle more and more calls will increase. The maximum number of simultaneous calls which Digium (creators of Asterisk) will support is 250 calls, I really hope that soon they increase this capacity because it really is stifling Asterisk’s growth amongst service providers… but then again, these type of large call loads are not easy to achieve and often require the assistance of those who are extremely well versed in Asterisk.
From reading the post, I did get the feeling that there was a little bit of voodoo involved with reaching this benchmark, but hopefully we’ll see some documentation soon to follow so others can start replicating and testing such a load on large servers.
August 28th, 2009at 11:10 pm(#)
Digium’s subscriptions for open source Asterisk ( http://www.digium.com/en/supportcenter/asterisk.php ) do not impose a limit on the number of concurrent calls, and we’ve talked to many customers that exceed 250 concurrent calls without breaking a sweat. We can’t guarantee you’ll swing 250 calls on a dusty server pulled out of retirement, but our support team will help you get the most out of Asterisk.
As Olle describes, sheer call performance is all about the hardware and tuning. He says his tests ran on the latest kit from HP — heady hardware indeed. And he clearly states Asterisk was configured as a media proxy for these tests.
By default, Asterisk installs with numerous feature-filled modules and applications enabled. Transcoding, recording, conference mixing, inband audio processing, etc. require more server effort than a simple softswitch hairpin. This may be a big reason that newcomers (and yes, competitors) get the impression that Asterisk doesn’t scale well.
Generally, the fewer features enabled, the more calls a given server can handle. Similarly, a racecar’s speed doesn’t match the creature comforts of a luxury sedan, and neither can haul as much as a cargo truck.
Asterisk lets you choose the right mix of power and feature complexity to build just what you need for your custom telephony solution.
Rod Montgomery
Director of Services, Digium
September 17th, 2009at 5:33 pm(#)
FYI,
Go check out Anthony Minessale’s presentation (Day 1) at ClueCon. The 10,000 calls goal in a single instance has been conquered with FreeSWITCH for some time. I don’t doubt that Asterisk will eventually conquer it as well.
http://www.cluecon.com – click the videos link under the thank you banner and you’ll get a torrent. Grab all the presentations or, alternatively, open the torrent and grab just Tony’s talk: Day 1, Presentation 2. It’s near the end of the video.
-MC
April 30th, 2010at 8:12 pm(#)
I always prefer to use Kasperky over Avast or McAfee. Kaspersky is much better in detecting new viruses and it does not consume too much resources on your dektop PC.”;.