Asterisk 1.8 Beta

[mcargile]

So it has been a few days and it seems like no one has really noticed that Matt committed Asterisk 1.8 support on the 20th. Considering how enthusiastic some people have been for getting this down I decided to create a new topic on it. Here is Matt's original announcement:

The changes to Vicidial have just been committed for Asterisk 1.8 support. This is in the BETA testing phase currently, and is not recommended for use in production at this time. While we have performed a lot of testing, we have not tested this in production, so you have been warned.

If you choose to upgrade an existing system, please make note of the many conf file changes(extensions.conf and manager.conf) that will need to be made for Vicidial to function properly while interfacing with Asterisk 1.8. Also, make sure that the Admin -> Servers -> modify server "Asterisk Version" setting is set properly for the version you have installed on that server.

To download a version of Asterisk 1.8 that we are working from, go to:
http://downloads.vicidial.com/beta-apps/

To download the Vicidial code changes, just upgrade or download the latest svn/trunk snapshot.

Which can be found here: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=22275

As noted this is Beta code. We have already fixed a bug that basically broke inbound on 1.8. Please be sure to take the necessary precautions before upgrading your system to 1.8. Above all make sure to do a complete back up of the system in case you have to downgrade.

[KeithHBW]

So what kind of improvements or additions are we looking at when going to 1.8? In a large cluster setup making 1000+ concurrent calls what can I expect to see? I was under the impression that it was going to be much more stable and allow you to place more calls per server than 1.4. I will try to put up a test server as soon as we finish some things around here, but not quite as excited after I heard I would still have the 150 calls per server limit.

[williamconley]

The upgrade to 1.8, as I understand it, will not be a "change" as much as a simple version upgrade. After the system is functional in 1.8,and stable, with all functions confirmed ... it may be possible to make some underlying structural changes. But I do not believe that any of these will result in a higher efficiency rating. The 150 calls per server limit (or in our case we have a few up over 250) is more a function of the control scripts in Vicidial vs hardware in use. Asterisk does not generally crash or fall behind. So upgrading asterisk will not remove any known bottleneck (as far as I know). But once asterisk 1.8 is installed, new features are available based on that version of Asterisk. And those features may well lead to new vicidial features (and in the meantime each call center is free to use them outside vicidial or with their own integration method ... and may contribute them for everyone else at their discretion).

Rant over.

[mcargile]

Asterisk 1.4 used linked lists for the data structures to keep track of just about everything. Asterisk 1.8 uses hashes which are considerably faster to traverse. This will result in a performance improvement with regards to accessing those data structures with a trade off being higher memory consumption. That said it remains to be seen if those improvements were eaten up by other changes made to Asterisk. Even if they were not eaten up I do not believe we will see higher than a 5% improvement in performance.