Friday, October 24, 2008

Asterisk V1.4 Performance

We recently ran a performance test of Asterisk configured as a SIP Back to Back User Agent (B2BUA). The test platform hosting Asterisk was a $1000 Dell PowerEdge 840 with a Quad Core Xeon X3220, 2x4M cache, 2.40 GHz, 1066 MHz FSB and 4 GB RAM. Redhat V5 was the operating system. The test was configured to simulate a wholesale VoIP operation with three minute call durations and an average of two call retries for every completed call. This was an "out of the box"Asterisk configuration with default settings and no optimizations.

We found that Asterisk on the test server could handle approximately 1000 simultaneous calls with no codec transalation. This works out to be about a $1 per port investment for a B2BUA platform.

When calls were transcoded from G.711 to G.729, the call capacity fell to 320 simultaneous calls. With the added cost of of the G.729 codec royalty and the lower call capacity, the cost increases to approximately $13.50 per port. You can download the test results and all the test plan details from: http://www.transnexus.com/White%20Papers/Performance_Test_of_Asterisk_v1-4.htm

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

any plans to do performance testing on FreeSWITCH?

Jim Dalton said...

Yes, performance testing with FreeSWITCH is definitely in our long term plans. However, before we can run a performance test, support for the Open Settlement Protocol (OSP) must be added to FreeSWITCH. Working on this contribution to FreeSWITCH is in our development roadmap for 2009.