SMS and oserl status

[Enrique Marcote Peña]

On Saturday 15 January 2005 00:18, Anders Nygren wrote:
> Hi
> I am preparing for a project where I have to send large volumes of SMS.
> I will probably be able to do this in Erlang so would like to know
> 1, the current status of oserl
> 2, is anybody using it for "real"
> 3, are there any other tools available for erlang to send SMS
>
> /Anders Nygren

Hello Anders,

We use oserl in a real environment, but I guess we don't count, since I wrote 
oserl myself.  I've been told some people at India were using it also.

Oserl wasn't written with efficiency in mind, but with the principle of having 
a *complete* SMPP implementation easy to maintain and adapt.  Oserl 
implements the entire SMPP specification version 5.0, and is the most 
complete open source SMPP implementation we are aware of.

In our experience oserl is perfectly usable right know.  Congestion control 
mechanisms may need to be reviewed.  We also want to change the 
implementation of timers, to use stdlib's 1.12 built-in gen_fsm timers 
instead of our own. Anyway, the API seems to to be stable enough.

We didn't spend much time doing load testing, but we did check how many 
messages oserl could send in one second.

For that test we implemented a SMSC and a ESME using oserl behaviors.  Using a  
PIV 2.8 with 1GB of memory on each side (SMSC and ESME side), we found out  
oserl could send more than 2500 messages in one second (twenty five hundred).  
The test we accomplished was very very simple.  Just send a PDU and wait for 
the PDU response from the other side, counting the number of PDUs responded 
in one second (We didn't cheat, the PDU was packed and unpacked every time in 
both sides). 

I know this test is not exhaustive at all, as soon as we decide to do some 
serious benchmarking I let you know, but let me say that doing the exact same 
test with other open source SMPP implementation, we could barely reach 100  
messages per second (one hundred).  Please also look at SMS forum to see 
rates people usually report on massive SMS sending, generally less than 100 
messages per second (one hundred).

Read all the information regarding oserl at the sourceforge 
(http://oserl.sourceforge.net).  If you have any problems, please let me 
know.

Best regards,

-- 
Quique