[COLUG] Asterisk vs. OpenSER

[Duane]

Jeff Frontz wrote:

> It took me about 15 minutes to get asterisk up and running for my
> (admittedly very simple) need; it's taken hours (and HOURS) to get
> OpenSER set up (and I'm still not confident I have it right, since I
> can't reliably reproduce the desired behavior).  Part of this, I'm sure,
> is because OpenSER is more scalable (I configured a user in Asterisk
> using a flat file, while I have to use encapsulated database operations
> via the openser daemon manipulated via commands exchanged with a clunky
> control shell script) and thus has a lot more moving parts.  In
> addition, OpenSER suffers from horrifyingly inadequate documentation;
> the previous version (1.1?) was a lot better (in that at least what
> third-party documentation I could find matched the functionality).

Sad but true. I had to get some help from others to get mine setup, but
in the end they both fed from the same SQL database.

> If you're only doing onesie-twosie users, Asterisk seems like the way to
> go; if you're wanting to support, say, 20K users, OpenSER seems more
> appropriate.

I've had Asterisk fail to cope with 200 handsets all doing SIP
registrations, not even calls, on a 3Ghz P4 I think it was, stuck
OpenSER in front and used Asterisk for basically voicemenu/voicemail and
everything was much better.

> Oh, also though OpenSER might scale better, my experience is that
> Asterisk more fully embraces the concept of "graceful degradation"--
> when Asterisk gets overloaded, it gets slow, but behaves sanely and goes
> back to normal operation when the load passes; OpenSER seems to
> sometimes lose its mind when it gets overloaded and only a restart
> (perhaps with an associated wipe of its mysql tables) will bring it back.

Sounds like you hit a bug or a config issue to me, same hardware as
above was coping with hundreds if not thousands of simultaneous calls
and no load issues.

I know of one VSP (VoIP Service Provider) that more or less dumped
asterisk cause of all the load on their systems, much to the abhorrer of
their user base because IAX support was going away. He hasn't regretted
moving away from primarily using Asterisk as the number of concurrent
calls he can handle went through the roof, without buying any more hardware.

Also Asterisk can't cope with multi-threading so most people needing to
run Asterisk beyond a single core usually end up cheating and sticking
multiple copies of Asterisk running load balanced in front by OpenSER :)

-- 

Best regards,
 Duane

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