Almost 60,000 outbound calls a day
Some of you know that while I was working for Landstar I wrote an outbound application that won Speech Technology Magazine's 2006 Most Innovative Solutions award. I've been asked several times recently if Speech Server is robust enough to take on heavy loads. So I thought I would do an update on the application.
The app made 6.5 million outbound calls last year and it has continued to grow such that it is now doing 55,0000+ outbound calls a day now. I had lunch today with my old boss (Dave) and my replacement and got an update on the system. The call load had grown so large that the app was keeping 4 T1s maxed out for most of the day so they decided to add another server to take some of the load.
This morning they stood up another server running Speech Server 2004 R2 Enterprise in an all-in-one configuration. The new server has 2 T1s attached and room to add 2 more. Both servers point to the same MSMQ queue and the systems are doing an excellent job of balancing the load. Dave said that when they dropped 30 test calls into the queue both boxes grabbed 15 of the calls so it appears that the servers are alternating taking calls out of the queue.
Well things have gone well so far today but they are still maxing out all of the T1s when the load gets heavy. Imagine, 138 simultaneous outbound calls. This is something that Dave and I had talked about doing before I left but the load just wasn't there yet. Now it is.
Here's a Perfmon shot (click for larger view) showing both severs ramping up this morning - Pretty impressive.
As Dave said, "It's almost like watching my baby have kids". Does that mean I'm a Grandpa now?