predictive dialer for 500K calls per day

[vnmastervoip]

Hello experts,

I have a request to install the Vicidial servers for the outbound call (predictive dialer) with cap. ~ 500K calls per day with average 1minute/call, and using remote agents (virtual agents).

What I understand that I shall need about 400-500 channels to handle that traffic, and I will use SIP trunk.

I never install that such big system like this, so I would like to listen your recommend on how many servers I will need for this system.

I really need your recommends, if anyone have experience installing this big system please lets me know, we can talk further.

Thanks everyone.
Mike

[mflorell]

What codec will you be using for these calls?

What answer percentage are you expecting on these calls?

Is this strictly a broadcast campaign with no calls going to real agents?

is this a "play a message and hangup" campaign?

[vnmastervoip]

Hi mflorell,

I am happy to see you on board. Below are the inputs

What codec will you be using for these calls?

We use g711ulaw.

What answer percentage are you expecting on these calls?

Our client expects to have more than 90% answer calls.

Is this strictly a broadcast campaign with no calls going to real agents?
is this a "play a message and hangup" campaign?

Yes, just play a message and handup.

[mflorell]

Given a 90% answer rate, a 1 minute message and a typical 8 hour calling window during the day for these campaigns, you are going to need 1000 lines actually.

For that kind of setup I would recommend 6 dialers(single quad-core CPU with 4GB RAM) and a single database server(dual quad-core CPUs with 16GB RAM)

[vnmastervoip]

Thanks for your quick reponse.

Given a 90% answer rate, a 1 minute message and a typical 8 hour calling window during the day for these campaigns, you are going to need 1000 lines actually.

For that kind of setup I would recommend 6 dialers(single quad-core CPU with 4GB RAM) and a single database server(dual quad-core CPUs with 16GB RAM)

So that means one dialer servers can handle less than 200concurrents call? and I've heard from somewhere that the hopper list cannot excess 5000 records, is that true? if it is true, how can I upload 500k records just for one day dialling out?

[mflorell]

For a single quad-core CPU system doing broadcast dialing, we recommend that it handle upto 160 concurrent calls.

As for the hopper, that has nothing to do with the lead limit, we have clients with over 20,000,000 active leads in their system, and we have done systems that well exceed 1,000,000 leads per day, so your requirements are not a problem at all for ViciDial.

[vnmastervoip]

Thanks for your usefull recommendation.

[williamconley]

if that is all your system is doing, i would not (don't listen matt!) recommend Vicidial. build your own in a SINGLE SERVER with pure asterisk.

we have this running on Gentoo64 with a Phenom processor and a 100Meg net connection and it will run very nicely in a SINGLE box without trixbox, freepbx, vicidial, nothing just ASTERISK.

Of course, it can't do anything else, it just Dials Broadcast/Press One, but no logging in, the agents have no screens, etc.

But if you don't want logged in agents this method is perfect and requires only a single monster machine.

It is also possible to have a Vicidial Box locally with the agents logged in (which would consider these calls Inbound when they arrive).

This sort of system gets a lot of use during political seasons.

[mflorell]

You have a single-box solution that can broadcast dial 1000 concurrent calls using Asterisk?

I would like to hear more about this.

[williamconley]

it "cruises" at about 800+

we generally hit the limit with 25 calls per second unless we use multiple providers, but the average client is happy with 800+ calls, as a rule.

This would not be entirely possible, i don't think, without the 64bit Gentoo and the Phenom processor.

But the dial plan, that's "bare bones". Seriously. LOL

[vnmastervoip]

it "cruises" at about 800+

we generally hit the limit with 25 calls per second unless we use multiple providers, but the average client is happy with 800+ calls, as a rule.

This would not be entirely possible, i don't think, without the 64bit Gentoo and the Phenom processor.

But the dial plan, that's "bare bones". Seriously. LOL

If you dont mind, please provide more how can you do that, some example is great

Thanks
Mike

[vnmastervoip]

As MATT said I should need 01 strong DB server ans 5-6 Asterisk/dialer server to handle this application. I just concert how the call are sharing between 5-6 Asterisk servers.

Thanks
Mike

[mflorell]

We added a new option to the AST_VDauto_dial_FILL.pl script that will do better blending of calls across the servers to ensure better utilization of the cluster for high-volume calling campaigns like yours.

[xirin6]

"It "cruises" at about 800+

we generally hit the limit with 25 calls per second unless we use multiple providers, but the average client is happy with 800+ calls, as a rule.

This would not be entirely possible, i don't think, without the 64bit Gentoo and the Phenom processor.

But the dial plan, that's "bare bones". Seriously. LOL"

I am very interested in hearing about how you configured asterisk to do this? I always believed that there would be some limits to how many playback channels of audio the server could handle while keeping track of setting up and tearing down the call, ect..
What kind of optimisations did you do ? Please share.

[williamconley]

As MATT said I should need 01 strong DB server ans 5-6 Asterisk/dialer server to handle this application. I just concert how the call are sharing between 5-6 Asterisk servers.

Thanks
Mike

Vicidial Servers can be "clustered" so that they can actually share logged in users, campaigns, the vicidial list itself, etc.

So you build TWO to THIRTY vicidial servers and follow the "Clustering" instructions ... then when agents log in, they are logging in to the Cluster, not merely an individual server (they log on to server that is part of the cluster, instead of standalone).

This allows virtually unlimited Enterprise growth without "tracking" the same information in 20 servers, since they are all sharing the same data and actually transfer calls between each other to reach the appropriate parties.

For instance, if a call is answered on a campaign on server 8, but there are no available agents on server 8, the system will pass the call through to server 6 and place it in the conference with the free agent there. Instantly. That's what a Vicidial Cluster does (in the simplest terms).

[williamconley]

"It "cruises" at about 800+

I am very interested in hearing about how you configured asterisk to do this? I always believed that there would be some limits to how many playback channels of audio the server could handle while keeping track of setting up and tearing down the call, ect..
What kind of optimisations did you do ? Please share.

Vicidial is Open Source.

We wrote this software ourselves. It is not a "modified" form of anything. NOT open source. But not particularly difficult to do, after you remember NOT to add FreePBX, Vicidial, or any other "load causing" software. But it has NONE of the features of Vicidial.

If you have ever hired someone to run a 1000 line "Press One" campaign and pass calls through to your call center, please do not think they had Vicidial doing this. They wrote their own software in Asterisk (just as we did) and kept it simple. At that point, of course, the full power of a 64-bit OS is helpful.

[mcargile]

If you have ever hired someone to run a 1000 line "Press One" campaign and pass calls through to your call center, please do not think they had Vicidial doing this. They wrote their own software in Asterisk (just as we did) and kept it simple. At that point, of course, the full power of a 64-bit OS is helpful.

We actually have several clients that are either gearing up to or are doing 1000+ line "Press One" campaigns in Vicidial. These clients are either doing non-profit calling, political calling, or collections. Some of whom are coming from custom in house built asterisk solutions, mainly do to regulatory compliance problems, lack of logging, lack of reporting, stability issues, and ease of customization. Why do you think there so many "Press One" features built into Vicidial? With a properly setup Vicidial cluster a manager who knows absolutely nothing about Asterisk can easily switch the audio recording, and the options that the customer can choose.

I do not doubt that you can get 800+ channels through a single beefy Asterisk server with a number of optimizations. Four years ago I was able to get 16 T1s into a single dual quad core server. Some optimizations I can think of off of the top of my head include running everything important out of or writing to a ram drive (audio files, agi scripts, etc), as you said a very basic dialplan, transcoding the audio file ahead of time into the native format of the channel, direct dialing of asterisk channels rather than using local channels, off loading unneeded asterisk modules and many more. I would agree that running a highly optimized Gentoo system would indeed improve things marginally (hey every little bit helps), but the only true benefit of using 64bit for this over 32bit is the improved memory space. If you need more than 4 gigs worth of memory space, there is probably something using more ram than it needs too. What I am concerned about is stability, regulatory compliance, and logging. All of which would take months worth of development to do properly.

Vicidial on the other hand can use several of these optimizations out of the box. It requires no custom programing to handle what most people are looking for in a "Press-One" campaign. It does not require a monster machine which tend to be quite expensive, but several lesser powered machines. Because it is a distributed design, even if one of the dialers crashes you do not loose your entire dialing capacity and all of your connected calls. It is fully US, Canadian, and UK regulatory compliant out of the box when managed correctly. It has full logging of outbound calls. It has many reports that give detail information about the outbound dialing. It does not require a skilled asterisk technician to make basic changes to the message or the options that are available to the dialed customer. Sure it is not necessarily the most highly optimized "Press One" dialing system out there, but for the feature set that it comes with it seems to be far more cost effective in the long run. Please keep in mind that I am basing this comparison on the limited information you have given about this system that you have developed. If I am wrong about this, feel free to correct me.

[williamconley]

You don't have to defend Vicidial to me, LOL! But the concept of 7-10 servers vs ONE server (albeit an expensive one, but it wasn't THAT expensive) connected to a single 100M Fiber connection just plain whups butt. All calls are simply logged, compliance is a matter of reporting. Drop Call percentages are not required for a political press one campaign where NO calls are dropped. DNC is not involved for exempt clients, and for those who are not, all calls are logged anyway. Better yet, they are not just logged by our dialer but also by the provider (and available for download via the provider's API for comparison to our system's CDRDB for invoicing).

But you are right about one thing, the OTHER features (and modification capacity, expandability, etc.) of Vicidial are irreplaceable. Except in the one instance of a campaign that runs once every two or four years exactly the same way with as much ooomph as one box can push until the required number of calls has completed (or the season is over). Used to be the season would complete before the machinery could use all the numbers. But with a cruising altitude of 800channels, it seems that the box gets there fast enough these days. So far noone has ever used both boxes at the same time for that very reason.

So our version is great for its niche, but will never be a replacement for Vicidial. For all our OTHER clients, it's ALL Vicidial. But those few ...

[williamconley]

i mean, who wants to build a Seven Server Cluster for 30 days of use? (or keep Seven Servers in a Cluster "Available" for lease for 30 days?)

[mcargile]

I did not want to imply that you were bashing Vicidial. I just wanted to point out that there are plenty of people using Vicidial for 1000+ line broadcast and press 1 systems, and that Vicidial can be well suited for this if setup correctly.

Most of the clients I have run across looking to build such a system use it for much longer than 30 days and for far more than just a single broadcast campaign, which is why the feature set seemed the most important aspect of this to me.

That and I did not want people to think that just setting up a very basic IVR in your dial plan and then blasting out hundreds of calls using the manager interface is necessarily a good idea (hence the logging and stability points). Some of our customers are coming from systems like this and are facing big problems because of it.

[williamconley]

extremely true. a "just take a shot at it" dial plan can be a disaster from a "compliance" (read: "FINE $$") standpoint as well as the simple concept that a box such as this has a single use. Whereas the same setup in Vicidial would have unparalleled flexibility. With all the power of the various "types" of dialer/dialing and integration possibilities (and code-cleansing) inherent in Vicidial, that is why we use it for all call centers. But there must be an exception for every rule, of course.

So far, noone has "purchased" one of the monster boxes, but they sure get their use for short term clients simply accomplishing their task-at-hand. (ie: "We need to make 1.2M calls over the next XX days, we have our list and our recording .... and Ca$h"). We validate with their legal department, initiate the 100M Circuit, then awaken the Beast. LOL