SMS FAQ

The most important in tuning the system for performance is to disable functionality that requires disk operations. The two most obvious things to do are to disable persistent message queues and to disable detailed logging. Also it is a good option to limit the number of outgoing and incoming routes to the minimum and to disable other unnecesary functionality, such as accounting, unused user and application configurations etc.

You can purchase consultancy or you can purchase our performance optimization service to help you tune your system.

The software has a built in loadbalancing functionality that is useful for two reasons. It can be used to handle unreliable service provider connections and to increase the message capacity. To handle unreliable service provider connections we recommend to setup two simultaneous connections to the same service provider and configure the software to do loadbalancing between them.

To setup loadbalancing between two service provider connections, you should assign the same service provider name to both connections in the configuration form. (You can have up to 10 connections assigned to a balanced connection.)

We recommend to open two connections to the same service provider and configure the SMS gateway to perform loadbalancing between them.

First, we should mention that this SMS gateway was designed to work 24/7. It is very reliable. However, it might be possible that there is a power outage, the hardware fails, or the network goes down or some other external problem occurs (for example, the hard disk becomes full, the memory becomes exhausted, etc.). To overcome these issues we suggest to run two instances of the software on two different PCs in two different locations. This way you can make the system more tolerant for failures.

If you have two systems running, you can switch to the backup system manually in case you experience problems. Automatic switching is also possible with external software solutions.

You can use the credit limit handling feature for this, but you must decide which period you would like to use. You can have daily or monthly limits, but you cannot have both at the same time.

The credit limit handling feature allows you to set a limit for the number of messages transmitted in a given period of time. This period can be daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, or all-time.

The algorithm is round robin. This means that in every round one message is taken from each user's outbox. This way the users share the sending capacity evenly.

This means that if the first user has 10000 messages in his outbox, while the second user has only 100, the second user does not have to wait for the transmission of the 10000 messages.

The software's core performance depends on the underlying hardware. The scalability method we recommend depends on the way the software is used. If a relatively small amount of users generate a high volume of traffic, the hardware should be replaced to a more powerful one. If the number of users is great and the amount of traffic generated by the users is small, we recommend adding more PCs to the system.

In terms of hardware metrics, the most important are CPU resources and memory. For high volumes of traffic multicore and multiprocessor PC-s are recommended, because the software uses multiple threads to handle service provider connections, so it can utilize parallel processing. The amount of memory is another important factor. If several GB of memory is installed, it allows caching data in memory which improves performance. Network speed is usually not a limiting factor in IP SMS connections. Although we recommend fast SCSI hard disks, the speed of hardware is not very important, because with careful configuration harddisk access can be limited to a minimum.

Please note that very often the limiting factor regarding message capacity is the limitation of the service provider.

Clustering is required if a large number of users need to connect to the service. An Ozeki SMS Gateway cluster is a set of independent computers. Each computer has Ozeki NG installed on it. Each Ozeki NG connects to the appropriate SMS service providers independently and serves users independently of other members of the cluster. Customer connections are distributed among the members of the cluster in two ways: DNS based server selection or preselecting router.

The DNS based selection is simple, the DNS server returns IP addresses for the DNS queries using the round robin algorithm. IP addresses are selected from the pool of addresses assigned to the cluster. A preselecting router uses network address translation to distribute load among the servers.

Possible reasons: