[OpenSIPS-Users] [OT] about scalability, experiences, demands

[Henning Westerholt]

Hello all,

recently some statement came to my attention that "there is a common consent 
that the current design/architecture of [..] OpenSER (inherited from SER) is 
no longer able to deliver and to meet the present requirements and demands".

I don't want to argue that much about this opinion, in fact the demands to a 
Voice over IP solution depends very much on the certain setup. But i want to 
share some details from my experiences in developing and operating a big VoIP 
infrastructure here at 1&1.

We've about 2 million customers on our platform, that uses over 5 million 
individual numbers and terminate about 1 billion minutes per month. We're 
able to provide a good service with the actual architecture of OpenSER 
without any real problems. Of course there is always some room for 
improvements, but so far the main challenges we faced were not in the 
scalability or performance areas. More important issues are e.g. the inherent 
complexity of the SIP protocol and the maintainance of a good quality 
assurance and integration process.

We started some years ago with OpenSER 0.9.5, which we then extended a lot in 
house. For example we implemented more than 25 own modules, a own path 
implementation, did a lot of bug fixing and workarounds for certain problems 
we've found. We're able to reduce this amount of proprietary code a lot in 
the past, because of progress in the OpenSER development, intregration of 
our "key" modules and a lot of other contributions. We're using now something 
between OpenSER 1.3 and Kamailio 1.4 with only a few private extensions.

So in my opinion the actual design of our server is not "[..] an inevitable 
dead-end that needs to be avoided.". I rather think that we'll be able with 
continuing improvements to tackle the upcoming challenges well, especially as 
we will work together in the future with the SER developers in improving 
important areas of this software.

But this is just my personal opinion, everybody is of course free to have 
their own position. 

With best regards,

Henning Westerholt

-- 
Henning Westerholt - Development Consumer Products / DSL Core
1&1 Internet AG, Ernst-Frey-Str. 9, 76135 Karlsruhe, Germany

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Gottschlich, Robert Hoffmann, Markus Huhn, Hans-Henning Kettler,
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