Asterisk 1.2.3, FreePBX 2.4.1 and ViciDial 2.0.4 on CentOS 5

[Mika1974]

Today I am working on a guide to help people like myself - and call centers I work with - install Asterisk + FreePBX + ViciDial on CentOS 5.2.

There is already some documentation on this but thats all based on older versions. My obvious sources are (sorry new users can't post URLs properly):

Eflo Scratch Install (the PDF version)
Vicidial Wiki (Vici+FreePBX & Vici Easy Install)

I've chosen to use Asterisk 1.2.30 as this is recommended for performance with ViciDial (referenced somewhere in the Scratch Install).

Is it still the case that Asterisk 1.4 + Vici are NOT recommended?

Does anyone have any suggestions for or experiences with this kind of install?

Does anyone have any performance suggestions? Does it help performance compiling MySQL / Apache from source?

This setup (with FreePBX) is generally only suitable for smaller call centers (based on what I read) but it saves us a lot of time and money as I can do things myself.

Thanks in advance!

[Mika1974]

Any reason NOT to install FreePBX? There will be a max of 20 agents dialing through these servers.

[Mika1974]

Found very good guides on for setting up production environments on www.powerpbx.org. This is excluding Vici, there is a cryptic (for newbies) guide on ViciDialWiki. Looking to expand on that.

Is it still the case that Asterisk 1.4 + Vici are NOT recommended?

I now have the answer: "1.2 is still performing the best, but we are thinking about declaring the latest 1.4 releases as usable..."

[mflorell]

Asterisk 1.4 is fairly stable at this point, but it has not been in used long enough for us to say it is better than 1.2.

There are many reasons not to use FreePBX, including cutting the functional capacity of your VICIDIAL server in half and increased difficulty in debugging problems.

[Mika1974]

Thank you for your answers.

Please bare with me as I am fluent with using FreePBX - but not with editing Asterisk configuration files.

What functionality am I cutting in ViciDial exactly? (I am reading a Asterisk book and purchased the ViciDial manuals so I'll be more fluent in a week orso)

[mflorell]

You would not be cutting functionality, you cut capacity.

For example, we took two identical systems, on one we installed Slackware, asterisk, VICIDIAL and a basic dialplan. The other system we installec CentOS, Asterisk and FreePBX and VICIDIAL.

When we ran both systems in performance testing mode, we could reliably dial out more than twice as many outbound calls on the non-FreePBX box as we could reliably on the FreePBX-enabled box.

[Mika1974]

Good to hear some proper performance advice. So your also saying ditch the CentOS and go for Slackware. Alright we can do that.

Is there a document where there is more on performance? (Besides the machine specs already elsewhere on this site)

[mflorell]

There is a document on performance testing in the docs of releases, but optimizing performance of a VICIDIAL system is very dependant on what kind of call handling you are doing, what kind of server you have, what kind of telco lines you are using, if you are doing recording etc...

There are really a lot of factors in performance tuning and we have not written a document to cover all of that yet.