My SIP Switch

Over the last 6 weeks there has been a bit of a slowdown in new features with the sipswitch this has been in due solely to the memory leak that we have been chasing down during that period. I’ve posted on the forums site about the problem 3 times in the News section. A number of times we thought the issue was fixed only to find the sipswitch memory usage creeping up again. This is a real problem as if it’s not caught the sipswitch will at the very least become slow and unresponsive and at worst will crash.

One issue was found in the IronRuby engine that was a definite problem and a workaround was put in place that made a big difference. The ironRuby developers were made aware of the problem and hopefully it will be fixed over time. However despite that we still supsect that even with the workaround in place there is still a slow leak occurring. As such we have been working to re-factor the software so that each of the individual agents can run in its own process. The four main agents are the SIP Proxy, the SIP Registrar, the Registration Agent and the Monitoring Console. Currently they all run in the same process which is a nice easy approach to manage but not so good for troubleshooting and scalability.

The idea is to be able to have the sipswitch software able to run as a single process, useful when run locally, or to be able to split out into multiple processes. The splitting out has required quite a bit of refactoring as when everything is in the same process information can be share easily, things such as the Proxy looking up the contact on the Registrar. If they are split out some extra work is required.

So that’s it another quick update for anyone wondering what has been going on in the background. Hopefully we’llg et all this ironed out and get back to adding features in the near future. At the end of the day if the leak has been caused by IronRuby, which I strongly suspect, then it’s still been worth it. I can’t imagine not having a Ruby dialplan now I’ve had a taste.
Regards, Aaron

Following my previous article about PhonerLite I wanted to write a quick review of his elder brother : Phoner

http://www.phoner.de/index_en.htm

It’s a Windows only softphone (95/98/ME/NT40/2000/XP)

The configuration is also made with a step by step Wizard (nearly the same one as PhonerLite), so it is really convenient and easy. I tested it with My SIP Switch and my impressions were the same as for PhonerLite : really fast to get started, easy to use and I cannot complain at all on the audio quality.

It is fully compatible with SIP and has all the main options/feature you would expect on a softphone. What makes it a bit special is that it has ISDN facilities (which is not that common on a softphone). Note that you need an ISDN adapter.

The complete list of features is available here : Phoner Features