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Wiki HomeThe quest to find the smallest Asterisk hardware
Not that its recommended, but just how small a system can you run Asterisk on?
A summary from postings on the Asterisk mailing list::
Hints and tips
- Having Pentium MMX instruction set in the CPU helps a lot.
Winner, so far
Smallest system mentioned sucessfully running Asterisk was:- an original Pentium 100 Mhz, 32 MB RAM
Other small configurations mentioned:
Greg Boehnlein uses:
- P-133, 16 megs of ram, 3 PCI slots, 3.2 gig hard drive
- Voicemail Services
- 1 FXO Card for PSTN Connectivity
- IAX2 Termination to;
- Asterisk Server at Work
- NuFone for Second Home line and 1-800 DID Service
- Debian 3.0 w/ nothing running except Asterisk, Klogd, Syslogd and SSH
- Supports up to three concurrent SIP sessions before quality degrades
Someone else uses:
- Notebook has a 144Mhz Pentium, 80MB RAM and a 2GB disk
Another person uses:
- Pentium 1, 166mhz, 32meg ram, 1 gig HD
- 1 FXO port
- Voicepulse for inbound DID and outbound LD services (using IAX2)
- Running MOH and Meetme conference service
- 4 SIP phones running g711
Yet Another person has:
- Pentium II 233/64 RAM/2.1 HDD.
- It runs 2 BRI ISDN (4 Lines) + a lot of SIP devices.
Not the smallest Proc, but the smallest case by user Obelisk :)
- VIA Epia TC 1 GHz
- IBM Microdrive 1 Gig
- Linux from Scratch
- 512 MB Ram
Asterisk on an X-box
From: http://nlug.org/mail/nlug%5F%5F2003_12/0094.htmlMark (the man who made Asterisk PBX, www.asterisk.org) has an xbox that has 4 analog
ports via usb... aka the XBoxPBX
See also
- Asterisk embedded systems: Even smaller solutions
- Asterisk Slimming: How to strip down Asterisk
Page Changes
SCSI or SATA would probably make a difference here
SCSI and SATA both support backgrounded disk operations (that is, they don't lock the bus, and don't require CPU intervention; also, both have support for command tagging, which means you can issue more than one command to a device at a time). Even with the various DMA modes supported by conventional IDE, a lot of CPU time is wasted. Since older systems are going to need all the CPU power they've got, it's a good idea not to have them wasting it on disk accesses :-)
Don't go cheap...
Zaptel interfaces seem to be _very_ picky about the mainboard they are being used with. I've personally run in to echo issues with older mainboards, and even PCI busses that weren't up to the task. I'm currently fighting an issue where calls are experiecing "cutting out" with a P3-800 when the HD runs.
Running the Zaptel/zttest program, while working the HD as hard as possible is a good way to test a new Asterisk server. The accuracy should never drop below 99.98%.