I’ve been testing and configuring Asterisk for a few months now and ramping up the tests on a larger scale, utilizing all 4 t1 ports on the Digium te410p card.
So I was wondering what can I do to realtime monitor the performance of the machine, such as cpu and resource utilization? How can I bench-test the performance and gauge the capacity level.
I read lots of posts about what asterisk can handle and on what machines, but I dont know what happens when the limits are reached and what happens to the system once its pushed beyond. So I’m looking for a utility or some proceedures I can do to monitor.
For cpu, memory, and disk utilization any server performance monitoring tool will do.
For call quality you really need a packet sniffer and analyzer. There are VOIP specific tools out there but they are ridicuously expensive for a small\medium sized business. I use Network Instruments Observer which is still pricey but much more reasonable than the dedicated VOIP tools. You can use wireshark (fka ethereal) but you wont get the “expert” analysis that a tool like Observer will get you out of the box.
There are some SIP testing tools none of which I have any experience with. One is call SIPp http://sipp.sourceforge.net/
I have talked with several people and can confirm with my own experience that any current server with 2GB ram will easily handle 200 calls. You dont even need dual processors especially now with the 3+GHz Dual or Quad core processors.
Thanks for the response. I agree, for an expert analysis I should hire an consultant with their own equipment to evaluate the bandwidth traffic and such - I don’t feel my testing and release environment will require such a tight tollarance yet.
In terms of “ANY” server performance monitoring tool; have you worked with any packages, which ones are popular?
Normally my experience is developing applications under a windows environment, Linux is still new to me so I’m not familiar with most popular common applications yet.