Blog Post Revisited: Capacity planning for large call centers using Asterisk

It’s been almost five years since the post was made in reference to capacity planning for large call centers using Asterisk. As we know, five years is almost an eternity in the world of technology. With that in mind, almost all of the information in that post is still relevant today in some way, shape, or form.

Here are a few interesting points to consider:

• ‘A high end Asterisk telephony server can handle over one hundred concurrent channels with compression and voice recording.’ – This statement still holds true today. Although the definition of ‘high end’ has changed, Asterisk can still handle the load that was mentioned in the 2010.
• ‘The Web server will have to scale ahead of the Asterisk server.’ – Absolutely true. Web technology has evolved in awesome ways, and with this evolution, hardware, software, and services has become more expensive to run, in terms of the technical specifications. A web server five years ago may have been able to run smoothly and efficiently with 8GB of RAM. Today, 8GB would be a bare minimum and not recommended. Indosoft often suggests at least 16GB.
• ‘The call center ACD software will scale to accommodate the size of the call center with additional web servers and Asterisk servers.’ – Again, this is completely valid. As the size of your call center ACD grows, allocating more hardware resources will allow the center to expand in an efficient manner.
• ‘The MySQL database size will eventually limit the maximum number of agents.’ – This may have been accurate five years ago, but it is not the case now. Multiple databases can be used, with or without some form of replication, so that the database does not become strained and incapable of handling hundreds of agents.