[Serusers] Multiple Registration Servers

[Darren Nay]

Hey All,

This is a long email, so please bare with me...

Up until now we have used our primary SER serve as both registrar and call
routing engine.  However, we've recently hit a growth point where the
registration load on our servers is high enough that it's affecting our call
routing.

We currently have about 4,000 IAD's all registering every 5 minutes.  This
works out to be almost 13.5 regs every second, which in itself is a lot ..
If they were sequential.  However, at times we will get hundreds of IADs all
attempting to register simultaneously (within seconds of each other) and it
will keep the server busy for a few moments and cause SIP timeouts on calls
that are in the process of being setup.

Currently I am using the auth_db module with MySQL for client registration
authentication.  I believe that the MySQL authentication is what is causing
the high load on the server.

What I want to do is try to offload the the registrations from our primary
routing server, yet, I need the primary server to be stateful of the all
registered clients.
-or- 
Find a more efficient way to authenticate client registrations so that the
load is not so high.

Problem is that most of our customers are home-based VoIP telephone
customers behind a Linksys cable/DSL router.  So, in order to avoid NAT
issues we must have all of our traffic which terminates to the IAD from our
PSTN provider come from the same IP address that the the IAD registered
from.  So I can't use another server and then t_replicate the requests back
to the routing server .. Because then the registrar /  IP address that will
be open on the customers router NAT gateway / firewall will differ from the
IP that will terminate the traffic to the IAD from our system.

So - my question is .. How do I take load off of the primary server??

Would implementing radius for authentication fix this problem?  I am very
familiar with radius (using Freeradius) and could easily set this up, but I
would prefer not to go to the trouble if it's not going to help with the
load.

Has anyone else had an issue with client authentication via MySQL and
auth_db causing a high load with SER?

I am hoping that you fine folks might be able to point me in the right
direction.  Thanks so much!

Darren Nay 
VoIP Network Development
Ionosphere, Inc
dnay at ionosphere.net