please provide content and decency for ser/openser debates (was strangely: Re: [Serusers] Re: [Users] TM : retransmission timers

Jiri Kuthan jiri at iptel.org
Tue Nov 28 15:50:39 CET 2006


Daniel,

and please of course anyone else.

Please, I am kindly asking folks to discontinue use of offensive language, inaccurate 
information, personal attacks, and other flammables -- that really must stop.

I think that pure technical content is the best we can get, is of solid value,
and can (and should) be challenged in the technical language too. I think it
is great to see measurements, technical counter-arguments and updated measurements
reflecting the arguments -- I'm looking forward to more of those.

But don't let us get it mixed with hostile non-technical content. In the end,
it is this hostile tone which effectively impedes ser/openser progress.
Users benefit of each, and actually there is a reasonable desire to 
cross-benefit of both, which is not achievable without respect. 

Addressing that would (will) be a longer email, but for now I hope people
will be fine with understandable suggestion: CONSIDER BEING POLITE! With 
this very simple suggestion, all of the lengthy recommendations bellow will 
automatically become useless :-)

-jiri

----

Now the things I really consider counterproductive and I would like their 
respective authors to develop a more appropriate communication style for:
- the pseudo "history" webpage for openser is just too dishonest. I have posted
  my opinion on it and site owners, voice sistem, have not provided an answer,
  not speaking of an excuse. (I know Klaus did answer nicely, but still I think 
  people who own it should stand up.)  It is twisted language, but it really 
  suggests that SER was  discontinued when at the same time the originators of 
  the gossip actively copied-and-pasted SER code.
  http://lists.iptel.org/pipermail/serusers/2006-November/031423.html 
  The level of how dishonest this is and how little respect to SER developers it
  shows makes me really concerned.
- personal attacks are just silly. I really don't think there is any possible
  gain in suggesting someone's ignorance by offering tutorials.
  http://lists.iptel.org/pipermail/serusers/2006-November/031490.html
  I'm sure the email author, who is largely leveraging  Andrei's code in openser, 
  will feel painful when he cools down later, but let's better be polite before 
  than too late.
- I really advise people not to use gossip language.  Reference to "undisclosed 
  private channels" regarding SER activity status in  DAniel's  Email I am replying 
  to, compared to facts such as SER release announcement
  (http://www.iptel.org/new_major_ser_pre_release_ottendorf_is_out_for_testing)
  provides you with quite different information density (ehmmm....)
- Responding to technical information with rants does not make things any
  better either. I am sure that openser's performance may be a negative
  experience, but that's not an excuse to attack a solid performance report
  with derogative attempts to undermine its credibility. E.g., this is
  an example of inappropriate communication:
  http://lists.iptel.org/pipermail/serusers/2006-November/031421.html
  -- it tries to attack credibility, but it is not getting to the point.
  Later, Bogdan Iancu, is trying to question it by reference to a bug
   http://lists.iptel.org/pipermail/serusers/2006-November/031487.html
  Seriously, this only helps to generate flames and conceal some structural
  shortcomings, but it really does not make things better. I suggest folks
  examine the performance report in terms of technical validity -- so far
  I have seen updated measurements were provided in response to technical
  arguments dilligently.
- Generally, the level of credits SER authors obtain from those who have
  commit rights to openser shows that the communication culture really
  needs to be improved. It just can't be that credits for the work,
  on which openser depends, are concealed and credited to someone else. 
  For sake of completness, I'm referring to this
  http://lists.iptel.org/pipermail/serusers/2006-November/031439.html

Some of these things are really matter of attitude, but even with that,
as absolute minimum, everyone should develop effort to speak facts in 
cultivated, polite manner which does not ofend anyone else.

I have been travelling and off-line and cannot quickly catch up on the
content exchanged now and will try to, but folks: the tone really must
change.


ps -- I subscribed to openser, hopefuly my emails will get through now.


At 22:16 27/11/2006, Daniel-Constantin Mierla wrote:
>As I can see, you get better and better with openser, maybe you can get some training so you will be able to configure and tune it properly to fit your needs and get the appropriate results (googling will reveal some doing trainings for openser). So which are right, these ones, the previous ones or the next testing results? You tested something, which (I suppose) you are very familiar with (ser), against something that you do not know properly to configure. There are some internals that differ a lot and may have quite a lot of performance impact.
>
>Just after you sent this mail, I have seen a commit to usrloc which saves some problems I pointed in my previous email in this thread (so, yes, we are concerned about performance, and see you need to catch up now in some directions). The difference is now that ser's usrloc hash table size is by default 2^14 (16384) while in openser is 2^9 (512). So I guess some tests you can do now will be faster for ser, but to change the hash value in ser you have to re-compile, as opposite to openser where you can do it via module parameter.
>
>So please, try to make sure that the corresponding parameters have same values, from number of processes, to memory, hash tables sizes, and so on ... for future tests. If you are not able to do fair tests, it is better to leave it for some impartial entities. With the description of your tests a lot of parameters and variables are hidden, and do not reflect the real capacity of the applications (I can say it now at least for openser).
>
>And just to remember, as proved, you got very good performances but wrong processing. I will ask you and users: do you prefer to have *high performances* tied to *invalid processing* of the requests?
>http://openser.org/pipermail/users/2006-November/007843.html
>Well, maybe for some folks it is a 'proud' to say: *ser offers very fast _invalid_ functionalities* or "ser can scale to millions of _offline_ users*.
>
>You owe to say to the users that the performances were obtained with a *buggy SIP transaction processing*, and correct the web pages posted at the link below.
>
>Actually I replied to this mail because of some accuses that 'we spread the rumor  "ser is dead"'. Nowhere you can find such statement from our side. After some investigations proved that the phrase in charge is:
>"Soon after, /iptelorg.com Gmbh/ was sold to /Tekelec/, which had no intention to continue the development of the public project."
>from oepnser history (http://www.openser.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=40&Itemid=61).
>
>This is quite different than "ser is dead", and many of you know the statement made in "openser history" is true. I cannot name some private channels I have, but there are publicly spoken ones. I paste from https://mail.internet2.edu/wws/arc/sip.edu/2006-10/msg00003.html:
>
><snip>
>Christian says that he was surprised at the continued development of
>SER after speaking with people from Tekelec, as they mentioned that
>they were not as interested in continuing SER as an open source
>project and were more interested in integrating SER into their IMS
>offerings. He asks about the future of SER as an open source
>project. Jiri feels that there should be no issues, and the main
>contributors are still making contributions. He's hesitant to speak on
>the behalf of the company, but feels that based on past performance
>nothing should be changing.
></snip>
>
>I would polite ask those persons not to twist the phrases without giving good proof.
>
>Users can see now who and how tries to hoke up the reality.
>
>Cheers,
>Daniel
>
>
>On 11/24/06 17:06, Vaclav Kubart wrote:
>>I'm sorry to nip in, but I tried to rerun the tests again and add more
>>info into output as requested and add stable ser and CVS openser.
>>
>>I know that this test doesn't conform much to real life (for example
>>generated callid/branch/tags differs only in a number, etc) but it can
>>give at least an image about simple stateful forward.
>>
>>So, if anybody is interested:
>>
>>http://www.iptel.org/~vku/performance/tm.serXopenser.correct/
>>
>>I tried the same once more with less iterations because there were some
>>errors in log from openser speaking about low memory (I used -m to
>>specify shared mem size but with 768M it still said errors, might be a
>>memleak or did I anything wrong?). With 1M iterations it was without
>>errors:
>>
>>http://www.iptel.org/~vku/performance/tm.serXopenser.1M/
>>
>>        Vaclav
>>
>>P.S. I have forgotten - SIPP was "Sipp v1.1, version 20060829, built Sep
>>5 2006, 15:07:25", I'm attaching simple patch which I have used.
>>
>>On Wed, Nov 22, 2006 at 12:48:12AM +0200, Daniel-Constantin Mierla wrote:
>>  
>>>I love such "independent" and "very very useful" tests ... one selected the versions he liked, latest development of ser with latest stable version of openser, the details about testing scenarios are pretty limited. However these details are very very insignificant, really.
>>>
>>>What matters is this particular case: what you tested is useless and someone can better implement a tiny kernel module to perform same job much faster that will make openser/ser trashed instantly if that is their only usage. More important are the performances in real world cases. I am not going to do comparison tests and reveal numbers, I will let you do and hope make the results available.
>>>
>>>I will exemplify with just two common use cases:
>>>A) ITSP where usrloc is required - to get the throughput from your tests one needs to have over million of online users. Let me know how SER is doing with loading them, I can bet that it takes several minutes to start (so service down for a significat time) and lot to lookup a record afterwards, do not forget to mention required memory. Then we will see if the forwarding throughput is the bottleneck.
>>>B) carrier - heavy accounting needed - take the latest cvs snapshots and test it, look at flexibility in same time and see if the balance of throughput and features is satisfactory. Do not forget that behind database should be redundant for a reliable accounting storage.
>>>
>>>My conclusion and the point I wanted to underline is that forwarding is not the bottleneck by far and so far in real-world deployments -- or at least nobody reported in openser mailing lists. Once it will be, for sure there will be effort and focus to optimize it. I don't even bother to check the scenarios, environment and test results you had, because makes no sense today.
>>>
>>>It is more important to look at the results gave, for example, here by an independent party:
>>>http://openser.org/pipermail/users/2006-November/007777.html
>>>
>>>With a real config and clustering system the performance of a box was 300calls per second -- having at least 5 database accesses!!!. If you need double you can add one more hardware, without extra configuration overhead, just plug and play. And that is stable version of OpenSER since July this year (btw, for those who keep saying that OpenSER does not focus on stability, just check the CVS and see the number of bugs encountered with this release, maybe you can change your opinion), and you can have a safe environment distributed geographically where each hardware can undertake the traffic from the others on the fly. With single box crashing because of different independent reasons (hardware failure, power outages ...) you get no service ... with three boxes you can serve huge number of active subscribers in peak hours and have failover support, so service availability 100%. I am sure most of the people look now how to build reliable platforms that scale very easy and can be distributed around the world, with a bunch of useful features -- simple first line replacement is not the business case for VoIP anymore.
>>>
>>>We didn't try at OpenSER to get a airplane when we have to drive city streets, we looked to get feature rich and reliable application for its use cases. I would propose to have focus on making own applications better than trying to show the other one is worse.
>>>
>>>Cheers,
>>>Daniel
>>>
>>>PS. You can use stateless forwarding to get even better results, the usefulness will be the same.
>>>
>>>On 11/21/06 12:30, Jiri Kuthan wrote:
>>>    
>>>>Regarding the technical discussion, here are some hard numbers which show
>>>>how SER stack outperforms derivative work. Forwarding throughput is clearly
>>>>several times better under stress and consequently, variation of response
>>>>delay is rather stable.
>>>>
>>>> 
>>>>      
>>>>>http://www.iptel.org/~vku/performance/tm.serXopenser.pulpuk/
>>>>>   
>>>>>        
>>>>-jiri
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>At 21:16 09/11/2006, Rao Ramaratnamma wrote:
>>>> 
>>>>      
>>>>>Hi Weiter,
>>>>>
>>>>>Yeah, I have been trying to limit myself to technical observations too, but the governance aspect is somewhat interesting too as a hint for future development, even though I guess even this is much more confusing than the technical ones. I have investigated, both projects have their firms with them that pursue their commercial interests which creates a risk of possibly departing from the public interest, like with redhat.         
>>>>>From this angle they look quite similar. But if any worries me just a       
>>>>>little bit more than openser.  Appearance at commercial shows on the "open" side versus technical event on the "net" side if I take your BSD parallel, marketing "open" webpage accusing "net" version bad, hiding root commerical sponsors on the "open" webpage, this could be signs for a redhat-like doubleedged sword.  Hopefully I am oversensing because I mean it is natural that everybody has SOME interest, but indisputably folks on both sides have done good work, but same indisputably more TRANSPARENCY would be helpful for both projects so that users can be less investigative.
>>>>>
>>>>>But I agree the technical comparison you suggest will be very useful if not most useful. This is what I am eventually upto. Anything folks have to tell in this topic is most welcome like the retransmission timers in subject or user loading.
>>>>>
>>>>>rr
>>>>>
>>>>>disconcerted by the fact that the more I know the more I am confused and determined to get over the learning curve quickly. also excuse the abuse I crossposted again but I think cross interrogation is a bit painful but the more effective :-)
>>>>>
>>>>>----- Original Message ----
>>>>>From: Weiter Leiter <bp4mls at googlemail.com>
>>>>>To: Kim Il <kim_il_s at yahoo.com>
>>>>>Cc: users at openser.org
>>>>>Sent: Thursday, November 9, 2006 1:42:29 PM
>>>>>Subject: Re: Fw: [Users] TM : retransmission timers
>>>>>
>>>>>Common user barely has time to meet his boss requirements, rather than playing around with different scenarios, platforms, environments. I only read one email where Daniel stated that OpenSER now performs a whole much better while loading users from database. SER guys put no figure out yet, neither bare numbers nor comparisons. I'm just really curious to see how both servers perform, that's all. Even though I must maintain my SER, I kinda like OpenSER's faster releases and developers' responsiveness (that I shamelessly exploit for the common code left there :-), which is pretty much nonexistent with iptel (at least this is the general belief here at OpenSER). But about this I'll probably have to fight on SER's mailing list. I still wish that one day I won't have to compare features; heck, NetSER and FreeSER are still available ;-). WL.
>>>>>
>>>>>PS. Maybe regretfully, I haven't seen any iptel booth at von this year, while OpenSER guys put up a nice show. My congrats.
>>>>>
>>>>>On 11/9/06, Kim Il <<mailto:kim_il_s at yahoo.com>kim_il_s at yahoo.com> wrote: I can see what you are hinting at, but I guess that the users are the unbiased party that should do the judgment and not the parties who have something to gain.
>>>>>cheers
>>>>>
>>>>>Weiter Leiter <<mailto:bp4mls at googlemail.com>bp4mls at googlemail.com> wrote:  This features comparisons are not to last for too long, some performance comparisons would also be nice. After all, there are plenty of UA-level stacks out there. At least now that both projects get to have stable releases after forking and some core functionality remained shared. I wonder what "unbiased" organization will take up the challenge. :-)
>>>>>On 11/8/06, Kim Il <<mailto:kim_il_s at yahoo.com> kim_il_s at yahoo.com > wrote:  Mike,
>>>>>this is a really good start and we should collect these things  so as to help the  community to take the right choice. I would also suggest that what ever ground breaking issues we list we stay at the functional level (I do not think anyone is helped by using a description containing "allowing carrier grade platforms" and similar marketing phrases). cheers
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>{truncated because too large}
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>Sponsored Link Talk more and pay less. Vonage can save you up to $300 a year on your phone bill. <http://clk.atdmt.com/VON/go/yhxxxvon1080000017von/direct/01/>Sign up now. 
>>>>>_______________________________________________
>>>>>Users mailing list
>>>>>Users at openser.org
>>>>><http://openser.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/users>http://openser.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/users
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>_______________________________________________
>>>>>Serusers mailing list
>>>>>Serusers at lists.iptel.org
>>>>>http://lists.iptel.org/mailman/listinfo/serusers
>>>>>   
>>>>>        
>>>>--
>>>>Jiri Kuthan            http://iptel.org/~jiri/ 
>>>>
>>>>_______________________________________________
>>>>Serusers mailing list
>>>>Serusers at lists.iptel.org
>>>>http://lists.iptel.org/mailman/listinfo/serusers
>>>>
>>>> 
>>>>      
>>>_______________________________________________
>>>Serusers mailing list
>>>Serusers at lists.iptel.org
>>>http://lists.iptel.org/mailman/listinfo/serusers
>>>    
>>>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>>
>>>Index: call.cpp
>>>===================================================================
>>>--- call.cpp    (revision 32)
>>>+++ call.cpp    (working copy)
>>>@@ -1812,6 +1812,8 @@
>>>           dest += sprintf(dest, "%s", (media_ip_is_ipv6 ? "6" : "4"));
>>>         } else if(!strcmp(keyword, "call_number")) {
>>>           dest += sprintf(dest, "%lu", number);
>>>+        } else if(!strcmp(keyword, "call_number_6")) {
>>>+          dest += sprintf(dest, "%06lu", number);
>>>         } else if(!strcmp(keyword, "call_id")) {
>>>           dest += sprintf(dest, "%s", id);
>>>         } else if(!strcmp(keyword, "cseq")) {
>>>@@ -2246,6 +2248,19 @@
>>>     return;
>>>   }
>>> 
>>>+  /* quick hack for UAS and loose router - needed to use routes +   * in the same order as Record-Routes */
>>>+  if (bRequestIncoming) {
>>>+         dialog_route_set = (char *)calloc(1, strlen(rr) + 2);
>>>+         sprintf(dialog_route_set, "%s", rr);
>>>+
>>>+         if (strlen (contact)) {
>>>+                 strcpy (next_req_url, contact);
>>>+                 formatNextReqUrl (next_req_url);
>>>+         }
>>>+         return;
>>>+  }
>>>+  
>>>   char actual_rr[MAX_HEADER_LEN];
>>>   char targetURI[MAX_HEADER_LEN];
>>>   memset(actual_rr, 0, sizeof(actual_rr));
>>>    
>_______________________________________________
>Serusers mailing list
>Serusers at lists.iptel.org
>http://lists.iptel.org/mailman/listinfo/serusers

--
Jiri Kuthan            http://iptel.org/~jiri/  




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