[Freeswitch-users] FreeSWITCH HA + Loadbalancing

[Raimund Sacherer]

Hello List,

I have read the current thread about scalability and I would need some  
advice about a callcenter setup:

First where I come from:
I have lot's of problems with an asterisk solution. I have regular  
crash's and lock-ups, with downgrading and other stuff i got it  
somewhat stable, but have nevertheless regular hickups. I am desperate  
and want to get rid of asterisk and I hope that freeSwitch will  
provide me with a more stable solution.


Our Setup (really nothing special):
* 1 Asterisk box, New IBM Hardware (3 month old), 2 HE rack server, 3  
GIG of RAM, Xircom analog switch connected to mobile stations for 4  
different providers, Digium 4port cards TP400<something>
* 8 queues
* ~60 agents (which logon, logoff, pause, unpause), not more than 40  
concurrently online
* ~ 7K - 9K calls (well, CDR entries) a day (not that much for a bpx)
* Music on Hold in the call-queues
* No special announcement
* Transfers between calls in queues and different agents as well as  
non agents (i mention this because we have transfer related chrashes  
in asterisk)

The current Problems:
* Lockups with different causes (ranging from calls not terminated to  
heavy thread locking through the AMI interface)
* Crashes and library aborts (pthread, libc, crashes related to music  
on hold, app_queue, transfers)

We used Asterisk: 1.4.23, 1.4.24, 1.4.26rc3, 1.4.26rc5, 1.4.26 and are  
now back to 1.4.21.2 (stock debian) as anything beyond that is for  
whatever reason highly unstable for our szenario. Maybe we should have  
been segmenting the box into one asterisk dedicted to talking to the  
hardware, one especial for queue/sip handling, i do not know. (all  
issues are well documented in issues.asterisk.org, but it seems to be  
very, very difficult to get to the bottom of them as they exist since  
1.4.23 as it seems and are open until know and not fixable since month.)


Now, I really would appreciate some success-stories on how you guys  
managed to get a stable pbx system with freeSWITCH in regard of HA and  
scalability:

* How to segment freeSWITCH? Or is it stable enough to handle all in  
one for such a szenario as outlined above?
* What would be the best strategie for High Availability / Failover?
	-> I read in the WIKI (featurelist) that Livemigration of calls from  
one box to another should be possible?
	-> I was thinking about using memcached for storing all state  
information so another freeswitch box can takeover calls from the  
first box if it dies, is this possible? If so, how?
	-> Is there anotherway to somehow configure freeSWITCH that in the  
event of a crash i do not loose the current established calls?

Basically I just want a stable PBX where I do not have to fear every  
day it will core-dump or abort or Lock up. Is freeSWITCH mature enough  
so i can sleep at night for at least 3 month without a crash?



Thank you for your Time and help in advance, and I am more than  
willing to take all the information gathered here and create a wiki  
page to help other people with the same questions/problems.

best
Ray


-- 
Raimund Sacherer
-
RunSolutions
     Open Source It Consulting
-

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