asterisk users - Apr 2004 - Re: Hardware for handling large call volume

[moved to asterisk-users, as this is not a development question]

At 1:40 PM -0400 on 4/24/04, Sudhir Kumar wrote:
>I would like to hear from any of you who has done any kind of
>benchmarking on a robust hardware that can handle large call volume,
>preferably with G.729 codec involved.
>
>We are in the process of putting together a system that should have a
>quad E1 card, G.729 and/or iLBC codecs. The test scenario we are
>interested in:
>	1. keeping all E1 lines saturated (SIP<->PSTN),
>     and 2. as many SIP to SIP calls as possible.
>
>I will share our experience with this group.
>
>We would greatly benefit from any recommendation you can give us about
>the hardware we should use. Mark, Jeremy, Steven, .... anyone.
>
>Thanks,
>-- sudhir
My rule of thumb has been 100 G.729 channels for a dual 3.0ghz Xeon 
machine.  Cost: around $42 per channel (I buy SCSI systems with RAID, 
and that includes the $10 charge for the G.729 license.)  Your 
mileage may vary in both performance and price.  Cost for an 
AS5300-style solution: around $110 per channel, and that's on the 
used market pricing plan.  DSPs are nice if you have a lot of money, 
but the price for doing DSP-type processing on generalized processors 
is dropping rapidly.  As the saying goes: "Specialization is for 
insects."  Even with the badly-coded g.729 codec, it's still 
impressively fast.

I have now been extremely satisfied with SuperMicro motherboards, so 
I'd recommend them, and the guys at Silicon Mechanics (referred 
through someone else here on this list from a while back... don't 
remember who) have done outstanding work for me with those boards and 
first-rate chassis/integrations/drives.

If you're doing SIP-to-SIP, you can often stay out of the media 
channel, which means no transcoding overhead unless you have special 
requirements (transfer, recording, etc.)  Of course, PSTN (PRI) 
termination will always mean media conversion unless you're doing 
G.711.  Keeping a system "saturated" means having busy signals, since 
to keep a system saturated that implies having more 1 more call at 
your minimum moment in the day than you have capacity to handle.

I've got on my plate the following things to measure (when I get a 
spare moment of life, which at this rate may be never):

  - latency/jitter/packet loss on long-haul IAX2 trunks (i.e.: satellite)
  - load testing G.729, ILBC, Speex, and other complex codecs as a 
relative comparative load on a dual 3.0ghz Xeon machine (quantitative 
testing, not seat-of-pants testing)
  - maximal traffic density on 802.11[a,b,g] links with multiple IAX2 
talkers (trunk mode)
  - maximal traffic density on 802.11[a,b,g] links with multiple IAX2 
talkers (normal mode)
  - maximal traffic density on 802.11[a,b,g] links with multiple IAX2 
talkers (routed)
  - maximal traffic density on 802.11[a,b,g] links with multiple SIP 
talkers  (normal)
  - maximal traffic density on 802.11[a,b,g] links with multiple SIP 
talkers  (routed)

JT

Does anyone have a T400P running on an Athlon XP with four T1s?  Would 
96 channels require dual processors?

Thanks,

John Todd wrote:
> [moved to asterisk-users, as this is not a development question]
> 
> At 1:40 PM -0400 on 4/24/04, Sudhir Kumar wrote:
> 
>> I would like to hear from any of you who has done any kind of
>> benchmarking on a robust hardware that can handle large call volume,
>> preferably with G.729 codec involved.
>>
>> We are in the process of putting together a system that should have a
>> quad E1 card, G.729 and/or iLBC codecs. The test scenario we are
>> interested in:
>>     1. keeping all E1 lines saturated (SIP<->PSTN),
>>     and 2. as many SIP to SIP calls as possible.
>>
>> I will share our experience with this group.
>>
>> We would greatly benefit from any recommendation you can give us about
>> the hardware we should use. Mark, Jeremy, Steven, .... anyone.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> -- sudhir
> 
> 
> My rule of thumb has been 100 G.729 channels for a dual 3.0ghz Xeon 
> machine.  Cost: around $42 per channel (I buy SCSI systems with RAID, 
> and that includes the $10 charge for the G.729 license.)  Your mileage 
> may vary in both performance and price.  Cost for an AS5300-style 
> solution: around $110 per channel, and that's on the used market
pricing
> plan.  DSPs are nice if you have a lot of money, but the price for doing 
> DSP-type processing on generalized processors is dropping rapidly.  As 
> the saying goes: "Specialization is for insects."  Even with the 
> badly-coded g.729 codec, it's still impressively fast.
> 
> I have now been extremely satisfied with SuperMicro motherboards, so
I'd
> recommend them, and the guys at Silicon Mechanics (referred through 
> someone else here on this list from a while back... don't remember who)
> have done outstanding work for me with those boards and first-rate 
> chassis/integrations/drives.
> 
> If you're doing SIP-to-SIP, you can often stay out of the media
channel,
> which means no transcoding overhead unless you have special requirements 
> (transfer, recording, etc.)  Of course, PSTN (PRI) termination will 
> always mean media conversion unless you're doing G.711.  Keeping a 
> system "saturated" means having busy signals, since to keep a
system
> saturated that implies having more 1 more call at your minimum moment in 
> the day than you have capacity to handle.
> 
> I've got on my plate the following things to measure (when I get a
spare
> moment of life, which at this rate may be never):
> 
>  - latency/jitter/packet loss on long-haul IAX2 trunks (i.e.: satellite)
>  - load testing G.729, ILBC, Speex, and other complex codecs as a 
> relative comparative load on a dual 3.0ghz Xeon machine (quantitative 
> testing, not seat-of-pants testing)
>  - maximal traffic density on 802.11[a,b,g] links with multiple IAX2 
> talkers (trunk mode)
>  - maximal traffic density on 802.11[a,b,g] links with multiple IAX2 
> talkers (normal mode)
>  - maximal traffic density on 802.11[a,b,g] links with multiple IAX2 
> talkers (routed)
>  - maximal traffic density on 802.11[a,b,g] links with multiple SIP 
> talkers  (normal)
>  - maximal traffic density on 802.11[a,b,g] links with multiple SIP 
> talkers  (routed)
> 
> JT
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> 
-- 
Michael Welter
Introspect Telephony Corp.
Denver, Colorado
+1 303 674 2575
mike@introspect.com
www.introspect.com

On Sat, 24 Apr 2004, John Todd wrote:

...
> My rule of thumb has been 100 G.729 channels for a dual 3.0ghz Xeon
> machine.  Cost: around $42 per channel (I buy SCSI systems with RAID,
> and that includes the $10 charge for the G.729 license.)  Your
> mileage may vary in both performance and price.  Cost for an
> AS5300-style solution: around $110 per channel, and that's on the
...

  I'm very interesting in a good per channel price, but $42 vs. $110 does
not seem to be comparing apples to apples.  You say the Asterisk system is
$4200 (100 x $42), less the $1000 for the G.729a license (100 x $10),
which works out to $3200 for hardware.  A Digium quad T1 card is about
$1500, meaning the server is around $1700?  Can you actually get a dual
Zeon 3Ghz with SCSI and RAID for $1700?  I assuming that you have at least
a GB of RAM installed, possibly more for 100 sessions.

  Now a Cisco HDV-2T1-48 card is $3500, with dual T1s and loaded with DSP
daughtercards.  That works out to $76/channel, and you need a free NM port
on a Cisco router to install it into.  It is certainly more expensive than
your $42/channel Asterisk setup, but for small sites is possibly less than
a Cisco AA5300, especially if you can install it into an existing router.

Tom

> I have now been extremely satisfied with SuperMicro motherboards, so
> I'd recommend them, and the guys at Silicon Mechanics (referred
> through someone else here on this list from a while back... don't
> remember who) have done outstanding work for me with those boards and
> first-rate chassis/integrations/drives.
I like the SuperMicros too -- I have a couple dual Xeon (only one proc 
currently) systems (triple-redundant power, dual LAN, all that jazz) -- these 
were perfect until I went to plug a TE405P into them -- I wanted one card 
that I could pull out and put into a low-end system should the mainboard fail 
and I was positive that SuperMicro's literature had stated one 5V PCI slot. 

Nope.  :-)

However, after a little research and a dremel, I now have a pair of 5v/3.3v 
TE405P that'll work just fine in any system.  :-)

Regards,
Andrew