Newbie Hardware

Hello All,
I have read a lot about astertisk and what servers can handle etc. I wanted to get a feel for what people out there were using and what kind of call volume they were having. I currently have a p4 2.8 ghz with a gig of ram and 80 gig sata. How many calls can such a server handle with good qulity ? Thanks.

it really depends on what you are doing, and what else is on the server.

Assuming that * has the server all to itself:

(note that the following are guesses based on what i know, and what I do isn’t high-volume. check voip-info.org/wiki/view/Aste … mensioning for real stories)

If you have VoIP users (sip phones) that call each other only and support reinvite (so the server isn’t handling actual voice data (media)), you can get several hundred or even 1000+ concurrant calls. This is because * is only passing messages for call setup and teardown, and is not handling any real voice packets. It’s all recordkeeping.

If when you add media to the mix (canreinvite=no or switching between protocols, so the box has to handle all the voice packets), this number drops to a few hundred.

If your users are calling the system itself, IE dialplan scripts, calling cards, voicemail, etc, i’d say keep ti down to 200 tops.

If youa re using Zap channels (such as multiple T1/E1/J1 interfaces), I’d keep it down to 100 channels or so per server. This is as much a limitation of the PCI interface and interrupt controllers as anything else.

Lastly, the hardest thing for a server is transcoding. If your server is encoding to a low-bitrate codec liek iLBC or G.729, you’ll have to keep a close eye on your CPU. You probably wouldn’t want more than 80-100 calls at a time, but YMMV. Add as many channels as your server can handle, but try to keep the CPU at least 20-30% free at all times.

If you explain what you want to do more, you can get a more helpful answer. Hope that helped!