Astricon 2008 - The Momentum Accelerates

I was at Astricon in Phoenix Arizona this week. It was a very good conference with approximately 700 attendees. There was certainly no indication that the market share growth of Asterisk is going to slow any time soon. It was clearly evident at this show that Asterisk is still early in its adoption lifecycle, but the product and community are beginning to mature. This is a good thing.

There will always be nostalgia for the good old days of Asterisk and the first Astricon. The first Astriscon was much larger than expected and had all the excitement of a new movement that is catching fire. Those who were there will remember the eager cheering crowd when Mark Spencer announced the release of Asterisk 1.0 and a free IAXy to whomever could post the news on Slashdot.org first. Everyone there felt special because they had the luck or foresight to be on the ground floor of something that was going to be big. And they were right, Asterisk is going to big.

This Astricon was also exciting, but in a different way. If you are an open source purist, you probably were disappointed that the zany, geekiness has been diluted by the growing presence of boring folks. Boring folks who either use Asterisk in their business or are part of the Asterisk ecosystem. I have been an Asterisk fan since 2003, but as a boring person I find the new maturity of Asterisk more exciting than ever. Asterisk's feature set, scalability and reliability continue to improve. It is now competing successfully with the blue chip PBX vendors such as Cisco and Nortel for the small business market.

At Atsricon, I presented our latest performance test results for Asterisk as a B2BUA. We found that Asterisk running on a Dell PowerEdge 840 with a single quad core 2.4 GHz CPU, running Redhat v5.1 can handle 1000 simultaneous calls of G.711 traffic and 320 simultaneous calls with transcoding from G.711 to G.729. The economics of this solution work out to be $1 per port with no transcoding and $13.13 per port for transcoding from G.711 to G.729. We are working on the final document which we will publish to the Asterisk mailing list.

Asterisk Performance Test Results

Our performance test results of Asterisk V1.4.11 configured as a SIP Back to Back User Agent (B2BUA) are now available.

For a summary of the results go to: http://www.transnexus.com/White%20Papers/asterisk_V1-4-11_performance.htm

To see all the details about the test plan, configuration files and test results go to: http://www.transnexus.com/White%20Papers/Asterisk_Performance_as_a_SIP_B2BUA.pdf

Asterisk Performance Testing

Over the last couple of months we have been stress testing Asterisk V1.4 to understand its performance. We started using V1.4.4 and advanced to V1.4.11 as new releases were made available. We have been stress testing Asterisk configured as a SIP Back to Back User Agent (B2BUA) installed on a server with two, dual core, Xeon 5140 CPUs running at 2.33 GHz.

The performance results look very good. When there is no transcoding, Asterisk can handle approximately 1500 simultaneous calls. When using a $3000 server to host Asterisk, this works out to be $2 per port which is a very low investment. When calls are transcoded from the G.711 codec to G.729, the maximum number of simultaneous calls is approximately 400. The economics are quite different when transcoding is required since there is a $10 per port patent royalty for using the G.711 to G.729 transcoding algorithm. The per port cost for using Asterisk with G.711 to G.729 transcoding is $17.50 per port. (Note, the $10 per port patent royalty is the amount charged if you purchase a transcoding license from Digium. OEM vendors could negotiate a lower royalty fee directly from the patent holders, but this is not practical for end users.)

More importantly, we have seen a big improvement is stability between V1.4.4 and V1.4.11. We have found that V1.4.11 has been very stable in prolonged, high volume stress tests. We expect that V1.4.11 will be the foundation of Asterisk Business Edition Rev C which should be released later this year. We see Asterisk Business Edition Rev C to be a quantum leap forward compared to earlier versions of Asterisk Business Edition.

We will publish all the details of our test plan, a summary of the test results and all the raw data on the TransNexus web site (www.TransNexus.com) in the coming weeks.

If you have any comments or experience sizing server hardware for Asterisk in carrier operations please post your information here.

Thank you