by mflorell » Sat Feb 13, 2010 10:56 am
There are a lot of companies using FreeSWITCH(and I personally spoke with several of them at Cluecon last year), but they mostly fork the code and do not maintain upgrade compatibility because of the poor version to version compatibility. Dozens of modules are dropped from release to release and core functionality can be changed as well, sometimes without any notice or updated documentation at all.
We used to use FreeSWITCH in production for our hosted platform as part of the back end, and it worked well when load was low, but once we started to get over 300 channels going through it for the application we were using it for, it started to regularly crash(keep in mind, there was NO media handling). Then we were told that the new version of FreeSWITCH fixed that crashing bug so we upgraded, but that was not as trouble-free as it should have been since some of the modules we were using were deprecated and no longer supported(yet are still in the docs), and they had changed how callerID handling worked as well(again with no documentation of the change). These issues required us to make significant changes to our application, and when we got it back up and running we still had the random crashing issue. In the end we dropped FreeSWITCH and are only using Asterisk and OpenSIPs on our backend without any significant service interruptions for months.
So, this experience did not endear us to FreeSWITCH at all. I admire their goals for a more modular and scalable telephony engine, but for our use we did not find it easy to work with, stable or with sufficient support behind it to continue it's use. This is why we will not be porting ViciDial to work natively on FreeSWITCH at any time in the near future.