Sounds like a plan. We will pursue it through the consulting@freeswith.org route.

Thanks,

Brian.

From: Anthony Minessale [mailto:anthony.minessale@gmail.com]
Sent: Friday, December 18, 2009 3:30 PM
To: freeswitch-users@lists.freeswitch.org
Subject: Re: [Freeswitch-users] mod_conference scalability

I am more than sure there is probably plenty of room for conference optimizations it's just a big task.
We don't have a test labbed up and an urgency to work on it.  If you really want us to pursue trying to improve the performance perhaps you can contact us at consulting@freeswitch.org and provide us with access your test environment and let us investigate the possibility of making improvements.

On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 2:16 PM, Brian <brian@proximosystems.com> wrote:

Hi  Michael,

Thanks for the invite, but I can’t make it on the call. Anyway, I’m not sure if discussing my specific case is meant for that type of call, is it?

After Brian’s suggestion to use shoutcast and local streams, I was looking at the code for those modules. I’m not familiar with shoutcast or icecast capabilities, so I don’t know if they can just pass though my audio stream unchanged (as uLaw packets). I want to avoid converting from uLaw to mp3 on the source server, and then back from mp3 to uLaw (or whatever phone codec) on the other server.

I was wondering if maybe there was a way to make a stream out of an existing channel, and have all the other channels just listen to that stream. It would be sort of halfway between conference and shoutcast. I would call in to the secondary server like I already do, but only instead of entering into a conference as a speaker, the channel would just start producing a local audio stream for the listener channels to tap into. It would avoid the need to have another piece of software to manage (shoutcast or icecast), and my support team would be happier...

However, I would still need to do tests for the streaming idea to see how that scales...

Brian.

From: Michael Collins [mailto:msc@freeswitch.org]
Sent: Friday, December 18, 2009 2:33 PM

To: freeswitch-users@lists.freeswitch.org
Subject: Re: [Freeswitch-users] mod_conference scalability

On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 11:14 AM, Brian <brian@proximosystems.com> wrote:

I was evaluating the technologies available, and I thought you would be interested in my results. However, almost every other reply I get from you to my posts, rather than being helpful, has been hostile and insulting.

Thanks for your input. Just so you know, Tony deals with people on a near daily basis who want to spend time doing crazy schemes under the guise of "load testing" or "researching a new solution" which are not grounded in reality. At first blush this scenario sounded like one of those schemes. However it definitely looks like you've built a test scenario that mimics reality better than most. I think we can give you a pass for not being able to get 500 people all at once to call in every time you need to test. :)

My scenario is not a hypothetical one of “having robots call the conference in a way that probably does not match reality”. In fact, this will very much reflect the reality of the application I’m building. Only instead of 300 listeners, I need to scale to over 2000 listeners minimum – per event, with possibly more than one concurrent event. I want to pack as many listeners on one server as I can. I’m trying to find a real solution to a real problem.

That kind of volume suggests that the icecast style solution would be best. It takes much less resources to send audio in one direction than it does to mix audio from multiple parties.  I like bkw's initial suggestion of transferring a caller to the conference only when he/she needs to speak, such as to ask a question. Like Tony mentioned, his focus is on quality not quantity, so mod_conference probably isn't the best tool for this scenario.

I work with other open source projects and fund enhancements or fixes I need. FreeSWITCH would be no different.

Excellent! It looks like we don't already have a canned solution, obviously, but as bkw likes to say, all the Lego bricks are there to build the solution.  Hop on IRC (#freeswitch in irc.freenode.net) or join the weekly conference which is going on right now and you might catch some of the devs and leading community members and you can chat in real-time about your challenges. (http://wiki.freeswitch.org/wiki/FS_weekly_2009_12_14)

-Michael

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