Greetings:
I run a multi-mode system, which currently incorporates seven regional nodes. Three of these are on rPi4’s running HamVoIP, and the rest are older ASL versions.
Two of the rPi4’s (the ones with the heaviest usage) are in data centers. One is on a multi-gigabit fiber connection in someone’s apartment, though it doesn’t carry nearly the weight of the other two.
The central point, at the moment, is a Linode Nanode.
I’ve been using linode (now Linode/Akamai) VPSs for a long time, and they’ve generally been OK for VoIP stuff, so long as you avoid the Atlanta data center, at least until your physical host gets oversold. However, I’m not hosting large numbers of connections on these VPSs anymore. For about 1.5 years, everything was on a single ASL 1.01 node running on a Linode VPS, not the bottom tier, but a couple up from that.
On this setup, things started to get pretty flaky after maybe 50 connections or so.
Thus, I got a bunch of VPSs in different parts of the country and world, and spread people out by region. This helped some, but moving the most active regions to dedicated rPi4’s helped even more.
One issue I’ve had with hosting VoIP on VPSs is the noisy neighbor problem, wherein resources are shared, and if other hosts are going wild, your VoIP traffic could suffer.
I am currently experiencing this to a small degree with my setup, where all the nodes are connected together using a low-end Linode VPS, and there is almost always a tiny drop-out of audio at the top of every hour for about a second or two, most likely caused by cronjobs running on other guests on the same physical host.
I am hoping to procure another couple of well-placed rPi’s to perhaps mitigate this problem for my own system.
However, this still leads to the question;
With ASL3, what has the general experience been running high connection hubs on VPSs compared to older versions of ASL? What providers in the United States have people found to work best?
A club I sometimes consult with currently has their repeater on an rPi4 running HamVoIP with some internal node balancing, along with Supermon 7.4 and a bunch of connections. This is stressing the poor thing out. Due to routing from their gigabit AT&T U-Verse connection, some people in the area, particularly those on wireless ISPs, don’t have good routes to their server, especially at night. However, they can b rerouted through one of my Linodes, or even a physical box 3000 miles away, and everything is just fine. So, we’re looking at solutions to maximize throughput/latency/resources there as well. Another rPi, or even something better, could be placed in the vault to strictly host public connections, but that won’t necessarily do anything for the routing.
They’re thinking of using a VPS running ASL3, then allowing the rPi to only maintain the physical connection to the repeater. In this case, it’s a club in Northern California, so something in the bay area would probably be preferred. I’m not sure if they would go for the cost of a dedicated server, though that’s what I would do if I could, most likely.
Has anyone majorly stress-tested an ASL3 hub with no other multi-connection hubs connected to it in various configurations to see how much it can take before audio falls off a cliff, and things start dying?
Just looking for thoughts in general on this topic.