asterisk users - Jun 2008 - Asterisk Openfire Asterisk-IM Plugin Performance Observation

Hi All,

I've been playing with Openfire & Asterisk-IM plugin installed on the
same server with Asterisk 1.4 with MySQL as the Openfire database.
Using Spark IM as the client on user machines.

It seems to work fairly well, not too bad to install.  This first
thing I notice is all the packages that must be installed to get
Openfire running, java-jre, mysql (needed for asterisk-im to work) and
many other dependencies.

So now the PBX is over 1.2 Gig for the installation.  Typical PBX
installs are under 600 Meg.  This makes me wonder about server
stability, reliability and performance as uptime creeps on and user
count increases over 50 to 100+.

Can anyone give me feedback on real world experience with this type of
setup and any performance issues that my arise?

Is it better for production to run Openfire on a separate server than the PBX?

My biggest concern is deploying a 100+ user environment with high call
volume and high chat volume.  Java seems to be a bit resource hungry
with the user notifications and call pop ups.  I would hate to have
the IM server walking over Asterisk and affecting call quality or PBX
stability.

Thanks.
JR
---------------------
JR Richardson
Engineering for the Masses

On Fri, Jun 20, 2008 at 12:47 PM, JR Richardson
<jmr.richardson at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> So now the PBX is over 1.2 Gig for the installation.  Typical PBX
> installs are under 600 Meg.  This makes me wonder about server
> stability, reliability and performance as uptime creeps on and user
> count increases over 50 to 100+.
Increased data on the hard drive won't really have an affect on
reliability or performance.
> Can anyone give me feedback on real world experience with this type of
> setup and any performance issues that my arise?
I can't speak directly to the asterisk + openfire situation. I can,
however, say that I've been running openfire for nearly a year now on
a very highly-loaded server (other than openfire, it's running nagios
and cacti, monitoring about 300 devices around our network) - the load
average on this 5-year single processor old dell server is pegged near
1.00 24x7. I haven't had a single problem with openfire, and I have
between 50 and 100 open sessions at any one time. In the year that
I've been running openfire, I've only had to restart it once, and that
was to upgrade the software. It takes very little CPU, and a modest
amount of RAM.
> Is it better for production to run Openfire on a separate server than the
PBX?
What's your definition of "better". Is it better to not have all
your
eggs in one basket? Is it better to only need to purchase one server?
Is it better to only have one server to manage/update/etc versus two?
> My biggest concern is deploying a 100+ user environment with high call
> volume and high chat volume.  Java seems to be a bit resource hungry
> with the user notifications and call pop ups.  I would hate to have
> the IM server walking over Asterisk and affecting call quality or PBX
> stability.
Speaking personally, I'd have no problems putting openfire and
asterisk on the same box. If needed, you could even just "nice" the
openfire process down to a lower priority than asterisk - it's not as
latency-sensitive as asterisk is. I'd doubt you'll need to do that,
though.

-Erik

> Is it better for production to run Openfire on a separate server than the
PBX?
>   

Since discovering linux vservers I put every service into its own 
"install".  Each install can be very lightweight and vservers only add
about 1MB to ram usage (I don't run a separate init process), so very 
lightweight. 

The advantage is that it's super simple to backup each "server"
and you
can test upgrades by simply copying the image, fire up a new instance, 
test your upgrade, then burn it down again...  Piece of cake to shuffle 
services between real machines also (preserving IP addresses also if 
that's required).  Backups can be done very easily (make the /vserver 
dir an LVM disk)

Good luck

Ed W