[arm-allstar] theoretical maximum number of nodes on one system?

[Patrick Perdue]

Greetings:

I am thinking of trying an experiment, basically abusing the load 
balancing app.rpt code and dialplan logic of HamVoIP to host a highly 
customized dial-on-demand Amateur Radio Newsline node, which will, if it 
works the way I hope, allow for one of ten nodes to connect and get 
their own private connection, which will automatically spawn a heavily 
modified version of the playnews script that I am running on my system. 
Basically, each virtual node will allow only one connection, moving up 
to the next available node when another connection is made, but one 
public node number will be used to access this system. However, rather 
than creating a bridge, as would be the case with any normal node, you 
get isolated connections, one per node, which spawns a script on 
connect. If this works, then perhaps I will also do the same for ARRL 
newsline.

This idea comes from the fact that, while it is very convenient, I've 
never liked the way the playnews script splits episodes of AR Newsline, 
so I took it upon myself to edit each episode into logical breakpoints, 
getting as much content within 3 minutes as possible, unless the three 
minute limit happens to fall at a bad place, at which point I break it 
up by story. To do this, I upload a bunch of ULAW files, and I rewrote 
part of the script to play each preprocessed clip in succession, along 
with a randomized set of announcements for breaks to keep it from 
sounding too stale. It's more work for me, as I have to edit every 
episode manually each week, though the process usually takes less than 
five minutes, but the presentation sounds much better, as I also do some 
pre-processing to each episode before uploading to insure that levels 
are a little more consistent, among other things.

So, anyway, this begs the question, with each virtual node having it's 
own app.rpt thread, is there a known upper limit of nodes at which point 
things will fall over and break horribly on a Raspberry Pi 4 - 4GB 
running HamVoIP?

I doubt that I'll ever get to the point where I have 10 or 20 nodes 
simultaneously streaming their own discrete versions of AR Newsline/ARRL 
news/whatever, and I don't know if this idea will even work quite the 
way I hope it does, but it's worth finding out, as I have been 
approached by a few different clubs about doing this after hearing how I 
present AR Newsline on the Blind Hams Network every Sunday at 3:00 PM 
Eastern. As it would be a lot of work to distribute my custom edits and 
scripts, I figure I could just make a dial-on-demand node do all the 
heavy lifting, and anyone who wants to use it can simply schedule a 
connect to that node. I thought about running all these nodes along-side 
an existing system, but it would probably be better to use a dedicated 
Raspberry Pi 4 for this purpose.

Anyway, just another bunch of crazy ideas from me.

73

N2DYI