Nowsms Gateway limitations

Nowsms Gateway limitations SearchSearch
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Paul Simon
New member
Username: Asangat

Post Number: 3
Registered: 07-2007
Posted on Monday, September 10, 2007 - 06:13 pm:   

Does anyone know the limittions of this product. How many simultaneous messages can each gateway handle (in/out) and can it be load balanced through a gateway farm type of setup?

What type of service monitoring tools can we use because I dont think this supports snmp traps? We tried a simple ICMP ping to the gateway web address at http://IP:8800 to see if the gateway is up. It works but at the same time we get hit for a SMS message for each ping attempt.
Bryce Norwood - NowSMS Support
Board Administrator
Username: Bryce

Post Number: 7431
Registered: 10-2002
Posted on Monday, September 10, 2007 - 07:01 pm:   

Hi Paul,

I can't give you a one-size-fits-all answer ... basically it depends on your configuration.

SMPP environments tend to offer the best available performance. NowSMS supports asynchronous SMPP so that we can pretty much blast messages as quickly as the other side can accept them.

And, you're not limited to a single outbound connection. You can have multiple outbound binds.

There is no predefined limit on the number of inbound or outbound binds. We have not presently tested beyond 1000 concurrent connections.

NowSMS is optimised to work with multicore processors, hyperthreading, etc., so that it can manage connections efficiently.

Historically, we've only sold licenses to 200 messages per second, but we have done a couple of 400 messages per second configurations recently.

As far as server farms go, for sending out that is ok ... but there are no provisions for 2-way messaging in that type of environment. A client would have to bind to a specific server to receive messages. (Although this is an interesting thought ... there is no reason we could not add a configuration parameter to relocate the user message queues to a shared volume ... I am adding this to the engineering work item queue.)

You are correct that we do not support SNMP. You shouldn't get hit for an SMS message with an ICMP ping. I suspect you're actually making an HTTP request. If you want to test that NowSMS is responding, you could submit an erroneous URL, such as with a missing "PhoneNumber=" parameter.

Or, if you wanted to get more elaborate, you could define an "HTTP SMSC" in NowSMS, where the URL points back to an application on your web server. Make sure that "Support any outbound message traffic" is not checked, and in the "Preferred SMSC Connection for" list, add a dummy phone number like 123456. Submit a message to this phone number (123456), and NowSMS should connect back to the URL that you have defined as the "HTTP SMSC".

That would be a good way to test that the basics of the system are working. Then you would also want to enable the e-mail alerts in NowSMS to have it let you know if you are experiencing any problems with your SMPP connections.

-bn