RealTime/MySql vs .conf

I’m implementing a project with Asterisk and we’ve come to the point where we have to decide whether to stick with the .conf files or go to RealTime/MySQL. We are leaning toward RealTime, but I’m looking for some reassurance that I won’t regret that decision down the road. Does anybody have an experience with RealTime that is positive or negative? We are looking at supporting user populations of 50-500 users, and will provide a GUI to allow admins/users to update the config (the main reason for favoring RealTime). Thanks.

In your case using a db would be best.

Has anyone done any sort of performance comparison? Judging by the -dev list, a dialplan with over 100 entries per context can cause slow downs.

Looks like the situation is slightly more murky then big dialplan’s should use asterisk-realtime

I ment best as far as ease of use for them :smile: Theres performance issues with flat files and db. WIth DB you also must look into latency between the DB server and Asterisk server which will add time onto the results.

One good peice of advise is to NOT use 1.2 version of Asterisk with realtime and IAX. Asterisk 1.4 handles this type of architecture much better though.

Thanks - we are on 1.4 so that shouldn’t be an issue. There are a couple of issues that have me hesitating to jumping into RealTime

  1. I’d say that I’ve seen quite a few posts on problems using RealTime - I have no idea how commonly it is used - maybe its just that it get lots of use and the problem frequency is no worse than sticking with the conf files
  2. The performance issue raised by campnic
  3. Loss of message waiting and nat keep-alive (not sure if the work-arounds are viable or not. Message-waiting seems like a must-have)
  4. Is there loss of flexibility in the dial plan? For instance, do “incluldes” work? - I see a patch was created but it doesn’t look like it is in the main branch . It seems like this would be a big problem
  5. Is it compatible with other Asterisk GUI packages? I haven’t looked at any yet, but I assume they are based on .conf files

We have to decide in the next couple of days so really do appreciate any input.

There are quite a few installs using it out there.

MWI and keep-alives work. You are probably looking at old information.

includes do NOT work. It’s not really a problem. You can put the includes in the flat file along with the switch statement for realtime and that works. You can also just use goto’s.

Not really sure about this. If you don’t go with a full install of an already available GUI you may be better off making your own since it would prolly take some work to integrate one, but I’m not really sure.