[VoiceOps] Any subscribers from the UK?

[Alex Balashov]

Daryl G. Jurbala wrote:

> Nor would I, but the setup I inherited is doing just that (registrations 
> handled by a commercial SBC, codec based routing directly to an asterisk 
> box or a cluster of Dialogic IMG 1010s, Asterisk using Realtime and 
> PHP-AGI hitting Postgres for routing) and I'm easily passing 1.2 mil 
> minutes a day.  As mentioned in another thread, I do need 15 asterisk 
> boxen to pull this off, but it works.  And once you get things together, 
> its surprisingly stable.  You just need to jump off the upgrade 
> bandwagon, pick one, make it work, and stick with it.

I don't mean to sound derogatory, but what is this enormous fixation 
that people have with building AGI scripts in PHP-AGI?

It's nothing personal;  lots of my customers do it, it seems widely 
prevalent in the ITSP cottage industry.

PHP is a language designed for serving dynamic web pages;  of all the 
runtime environments suitable for the development of standalone 
utilities, it is absolutely the worst and most perverse one you could use.

Secondly, calling AGI(somescript.php) causes the entire PHP interpreter 
and runtime library environment to be loaded *every* *single* *time* 
*the* *script* *is* *called*.  Also, there's no application server or 
back end to provide pooling of persistent database connections on 
demand;  every time you run it, it goes through the entire process of 
establishing a connection to PostgreSQL.  Every time.  Over and over.

I can only conclude that the reason PHP is so often used is because call 
shops hire developers chiefly with the aim of web portal/interface 
design in mind, and when it comes time to develop some of the backend 
logic used within the actual platform -- "Well, uh, we have a bunch of 
web developers who know PHP, so let's use that."  It's one of those 
succinct examples of suit vs. technocracy decisions;  it's a conclusion 
some "business guy" with "vision" would see as a very rationale instance 
of code reuse, economies of scale, and return on talent pool, but makes 
no sense from an engineering perspective.

It'll work for 1.2m minutes, but this won't cut it for high volumes of 
call setups.

The proper approach here would be to build a minor piece of middleware: 
a FastAGI service that provides AGI command responses over a network 
socket.  Simultaneously, the service can maintain persistent database 
connections in order to speed up that process.  It also gives you the 
ability to centralise all your call control and business layer logic 
into one "logic controller" and essentially utilise the Asterisk boxes 
as "dumb computing resources."  In the most extreme and rewarding case, 
you would hardly have a dial plan;  all aspects of the user experience 
would be dispatched through FastAGI, and any hostwise application-level 
constructs (such as Asterisk call Queues with a capital Q) would be 
parallelised and simulated through AGI-based call control (i.e. MoH, 
wait time announcements, etc.)  Then you can just "farm" the work out 
across a cluster of Asterisk boxes of arbitrary size and get higher 
returns to scale.  You would also not need to reprovision them every 
time you make a logic change.

-- 
Alex Balashov
Evariste Systems
Web    : http://www.evaristesys.com/
Tel    : (+1) (678) 954-0670
Direct : (+1) (678) 954-0671
Mobile : (+1) (678) 237-1775