handle the load

[jhdoan]

How many calls can my system handle if i have

1. 10mbps bandwidth from the data center.
2. want to use uLAW
3. using (1) Dell PowerEdge 2650 (Dual Intel 3.06 GHz) w/ 3 GB Ram
and (1) Dell PowerEdge 750 Server (Single Intel 2.8 GHz) w/ 2 GB Ram
4. anywhere from 1-20 agents.

I know that uLaw = 11 calls per MB
but what is my hardware capable of handling?
Thanks in advance.

[mflorell]

Will you be recording all calls?

What kind of dialing will you be doing?

[jhdoan]

I will be doing predictive dialing, press-1 campaign. and Yes I would like to record. Generally I pay a dialer company and 1 agent can have as many as up to 100 lines. For my purpose I would only be dialing at most 20 lines per agent.

[konextu]

I just put in a server using similar specs, the Xeon 3.06 with HT right? similar dell model, I tweaked it out pretty hard core and i've safely put 20 agents with a 3.0 dial ratio, most i've seen is about 34 active lines (sip via GSM) anything over that the system panic'd and load ran up to like 340. But i attribute 20-30% of the system resources to compression/decompression regarding GSM. This is just an example to work from with similar CPU's, I had two as well, only difference was I had 8 gigs of ram but it never used more than 2.5 gigs.

[mflorell]

Is that server HT or dual core?(it does make a big difference)

As for GSM utilization, we have gateway servers that pretty clearly show GSM adds only about 10% extra load to an Asterisk server.

It's very important to remember that Asterisk performance does not scale linearly, the load will go up faster the more calls youa re placing on the system.

[jhdoan]

Whats the difference between HT and DuaL. One one machine I believe I have a HT P4 xeon single 2.8 ghz CPU. In the other I have a DUAL xeon 3.06 ghz. I'm not sure which I should use for the Database server and which for the dialer.

[mflorell]

There is a big difference. HT is not muc of an improvement at all over the single processor, while dual core is an entire second physical processor. Dual core(or quad core) are much better than any HyperThreading processor. For larger installations you always want your fastest machine to be your database server.