[Freeswitch-users] differences between mod_fifo and asterisk queues

[Francois Delawarde]

Hello and welcome me into FreeSWITCH's world! <= sorry that was rude

I am (hoping to say "I was" soon) a heavy user of Asterisk's call queues
for small call centers with sometimes empty queues and all agents idle
for a few seconds.

FreeSWITCH's mod_fifo algorithm is apparently quite different than
Asterisk's app_queue. Instead of choosing an agent for a each call once
it gets to the bottom of the queue given a specific strategy, FreeSWITCH
does the inverse and finds a call once an agent is free given a strategy
(the call that has waited longer from all the agent's queues, or the
call in the queue that currently has more calls waiting). Am I right?

If the above deduction is correct, while it seems a MUCH better choice
for heavier call centers that always have calls in their queues ("in
queue" calls are not delayed by the processing of the call at the end of
the queue), I have a few doubts for what would happen in small call
centers when those queues sometimes get empty and several agents "fight"
for the incoming calls. My questions are following:

- If for example 4 agents are "connected" (fifo out) to an empty queue,
what happens when a call arrives? Do the 4 agents ring? If not, how do
we know which agent get the call?
- Is there an [easy] way (with some javascript or similar) to "emulate"
Asterisk's distribution strategies to agents (by amount of time without
calls, total number of answered calls, round robing, ...) in this cases?

A couple of other newbie questions that has nothing to do with the
above:
- Is there a way to execute some PHP scripts for each call that would do
the bridging or call applications (like Asterisk's AGI)?
- What is the recommended language for features, speed, and programming
ease (not a priority) for this kind of scripts (C? LUA?,
Javascript?, ..)?

Thanks in advance,
François.
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