64bit Multi CPU's

[rajiv_kuin]

Dear Matt... you have done great job and as you can see you got fans everywhere...

I wanted to ask... if we can run 64 bit linux and vicidial together... do you think we can use the standard scripts to run on this system... i am told 64 bit linux will be more helpful in taking advantage of multiple CPU's

I am sorry i am involving vicidial now here as well... but i am sure that standard vicidial operating system does not use all 4 CPU's in Quad core....

[williamconley]

Why don't you load it up on one and see for yourself. I've loaded it up on several dual and quad core systems and noticed that the performance is unbelievable compared to single core systems. Try it and believe it.

[rajiv_kuin]

I did try it on simple P4 machines with 1 GB RAM and Quad Core and Two Quad Core CPU's with 4 GB RAM .... to me it makes almost no difference.. moment i touch like 20 Users anytime i would start getting cross connetions... Load average goes like 1.5 to 2.... what i dont undertand that when i run sysstat i see all four cpu having no load at all...

so what makes either the asterisk manager or mysql do weired things like assigning same conference to two people... anyways thats a different issue... but to me seems like there is not much imporvment investing into such heavy hardwares...

Now i personally feel, may be OS has the key.... 64 bit might do better... now you can suggest me that... why dont i try to find out... my point is may be just hit and trial is not what we should leave technologies to... and i dont want to re-invent the wheel if someone can help me with one...

If i get an answer that yes... it works and does great and it takes me 100 attempts to make it work myself i wont mind... but if its possible and i can not make it work for couple of times i would probably give up... hope someone can help me here....

[williamconley]

interesting. let me check on a quad core install and see if there is something i can do to shed some light.

although i expect that since vicidial itself runs entirely under OTHER software (perl scripting, asterisk, mysql, apache/php), this may be something of a wider search in the end.

[rajiv_kuin]

You are 100% right here... any other things can affect the overall performance... so lets make question simple... if i can make everything else work perfectly on 64 bit linux..

Do you think in general 64 linux makes better use of CPU Power than 32 bit

[williamconley]

absolutely. if you can compile and run sql, apache/php, perl and asterisk in a 64 bit environment and make them use the full processor power, you will have a superior system. i expect that sql will do it (although I'm not sure about the free version), and i would expect apache/php to, but perl i do not know and asterisk ... well, i'm really not sure about that. and i would not expect to find it available for 64 bit on very many distros. and since asterisk is our main concern here, i would suggest finding a 64 bit distro of asterisk and work backwards.

[mflorell]

In practice I have not seen much of a speed difference between 32 and 64bit installs, even on the same hardware. Some of the 64bit systems have more driver issues than 32 bit so I usually install 32 bit. Also, for smaller installs MySQL 64 bit will use more RAM to do the same job at the same speed as 32 bit, so for smaller installs there is practically nothing gained by moving to 64bit.

[deck7uk]

We use 64bit for everything and find it far outperforms 32bit - especially for Mysql. Don't forget with 32bit you have a max table size of 4GB - if you keep large log/leads tables this can quite quickly become a problem.[/img]

[rajiv_kuin]

Duck, can you quickly give me details of what all you use, operating system, asterisk version, mysql version etc.

I would seriously be thankful to you...

[deck7uk]

Cent OS 5.2 (1000hz kernel).
asterisk 1.2.30.x (mostly - a couple older)
mysql 5.0.45.

we have six dialers each handling up to 30 or so callers (usually 20 - 25 ish), 2 web servers and one database box.

our dialers are a mix of old ibm dual xeon (em64t) 3.0ghz with 2gb ram and recent cheap Dell T105's (opteron dual core 2.something ghz) with 2gb ram. All recording to tmpfs then offloading to a storage box via nfs.

we use a couple of Quintum Tenors as our interface to the E1 lines and talk to them via sip - one dialer has a wildcard te212p using Zaptel.

The web servers are dell r200's and the mysql box is an 8 core (xeon 3.16ghz) dell poweredge with 24gb ram and a 2TB raid 10 array.

HTH.

Chris

[mflorell]

We use 64bit for everything and find it far outperforms 32bit - especially for Mysql. Don't forget with 32bit you have a max table size of 4GB - if you keep large log/leads tables this can quite quickly become a problem.[/img]

We do have clients running 64bit MySQL and 32bit MySQL and I would not say there is a significant increase in performance using one over the other for VICIDIAL purposes. We have run the numbers on the same hardware moving from one to the other when we expected to have an improvement and it just wasn't there.

As for the 4GB file issue, Not true, this is a common misconception that for some reason keeps getting perpetuated. If you have --big-tables and --large-files then 32bit MySQL has no problems with >4GB files. For example take a look at this call_log_archive table:

mysql 7057231000 2008-12-09 00:30 call_log_archive.MYD
mysql 2929159168 2008-12-09 00:31 call_log_archive.MYI
mysql 9114 2008-12-07 03:23 call_log_archive.frm

There is also no issue if you have more than 4GB RAM on the server(another misconception). We have 32bit systems running only MySQL that have 8GB RAM and MySQL has no problem using more than 4GB. The limit is per-process, not per application so this is not a problem for 32bit MySQL.

[deck7uk]

oops my bad
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/full-table.html
you can get over the 4gb limit by creating/altering tables in a specific way.

you would have to make sure that your OS/kernel is configured to allow large files also.

I'm not sure why anyone would want to use 32 bit over 64 bit for Mysql these days though. Especially as pretty much all modern processors will support 64 bit (especially if multi-core) and provide the large memory addressing / big file support straight away.

I guess "far" is a rather vague word to use really. With Asterisk, we used to have a couple of trixbox (32 bit) machines for callers to use (not in conjunction with vicidial) whilst these would handle the same number of concurrent calls as the vici boxes with similar load to the 64 bit vici's - the vici's were really doing double the work due to the nature of conferences as opposed to direct dialling, plus all the auto dialing in the background.

If one can gain 10% or more performance increase (or to be honest any percentage increase) out of using 64-bit then I don't see a reason not to use it?

[rajiv_kuin]

Right now i have 3 DVD's in my hand.. centos 5.2 x86_64, fedora 10 x86_64, Suze 11 x86_64... i am starting with fedora and lets see where we get as i am sure they all have apache, php, perl, mysql bundled with the distro...

[mflorell]

As always, we recommend avoiding anything from the RedHat family(CentOS, Fedora, RHES). So I would suggest that you use SuSE of those three.

[rajiv_kuin]

Dear Mat.. i go with Suse as you say or with shlackware which i see everyone is in love with...

Just makes me curious... you dont like it... but centos is what you chose for VicidialNow...

[mflorell]

I did not have anything to do with the creation of VICIDIALnow, that was created by a separate group of people. They are currently not using a stock CentOS install either, they have made many changes to a stock CentOS system including changes to the kernel to make it more reliable.

[rajiv_kuin]

Cool, enough... i got your point... right from the beginning in your scratch install you been suggesting Shlackware and thats what i would finally try my hands with now...

Here is as far as i got with my first atttempt... i downloaded AsteriskNOW x86_64 and installed it on a machine... installation was easy and someone suggested it uses rpath but it does not its was plain simple anaconda installation...

I then removed entry for running amportal on start(I know it can run parrallely but i wanted to do one thing at a time... ) and then i copied the asterisk configuration files.... agi scripts to the respective folders...

I ran the cpan installation from the bundled cpan modules we get alone with vicidial.tar.gz which is a part of vicidianow.... and it did not give me any errors.. recognised the machine as x86_64...

i did rest of the stuff according to install_vici.sh rather than scracth as i had almost all of the stuff ready... infact techically saying i just let database, cpan and astguiclient get installed as per hte install_vici.sh...

I got everything running the way it should be... i made campaign and logged in as an agent... but did not get any login ring to my Xlite... then i wanted to see how far things have moved and i set the campaign to pacing to 0 and then even though i did not get the ring on my xlite i still pressed the button "dial next number" nothing happened on asterisk cli...


here we have CentOS 5.2 x86_64, asterisk 1.4 with dahdi_dummy, sip exten and sip trunk... i checked in by dialing 8600051 and i got the message "you are only person in this conference and i am pretty sure that means dahdi_dummy is doing its job...

I dont think anything else has gone wrong in the process except for CPAN, as i have faced similar problems with a P-4 machine in past and some work i had to do with CPAN to fix them...

honestly... AsteriskNOW seams to be a great way to have this system up and running in no time provided i am able to crack the problem why i did not get manager to send call to asterisk..

I would like to mention that seems no issues with mysql... i got the data for customer populated when i pressed the dial next number and there were no issues in creating campaigns etc...

I am very curious to see how FOP shows the extensions and conferences and i am sure its gonna be fun if it works perfectly...

Any suggestions would be a great help... i would keep you people posted on any progress i make...