A few weeks ago I completed an upgrade from OpenSER 1.2 to Kamailio1.5. Overall it's been working quite well and actually was not nearly as hard as I feared it might be. Now that I've got this new version with a ton of new bells and whistles, I thought I'd try out a few of them. One of the most exciting is shared memory hashtables.

First a quick primer on hashtables. Currently whenever the proxy needs a value from the database it simply queries the database and gets the value. Straightforward, right? But as the system grows, the database can be greatly put under strain. In my Kamailio cluster the single biggest CPU user is in fact the MySQL database by a large margin. And since the database changes pretty infrequently it would be nice if we could cache those values.

The problem is that Kamailio is a multi-process daemon, so what's cached in one isn't going to be cached in another. Enter shared memory hashtables. The same cache is shared among all the processes. Usage is pretty simple. Here's an example:

# IP based authentication
if ($sht(ht1800=>$var(fU)::ipauth) == null){
	if (is_user_in("From", "ipauth")){
		$sht(ht1800=>$var(fU)::ipauth) = "yes";
	}
	else{
		$sht(ht1800=>$var(fU)::ipauth) = "no";
	}
	$var(ipauth) = $sht(ht1800=>$var(fU)::ipauth);
}
else{
	$var(ipauth) = $sht(ht1800=>$var(fU)::ipauth);
}

if ($var(ipauth) == "yes"){
	# do whatever...
}

Don't worry too much about the nitty-gritty. First we check to see if the value is cached (($sht(ht1800=>$var(fU)::ipauth) == null)). If it's set, we just use the cached value and continue. If not, we have to ask the database (is_user_in("From", "ipauth")) and then save the result in the cache. It actually is that easy.

But the $64,000 question, has it helped? Luckily I thought ahead and got some data before I made the change. I grabbed the query log for a day before and after the change. I made sure to select two days where the call usage was the similar (1% difference). Overall there was a 20% reduction in SQL queries.

I only put in the one change as a proof of concept. Since it sure seems to have panned out I'll continue wrapping all my database calls with hashtable caches. One thing I still need to work out is how to invalidate the cache when I make a change through my provisioning system. And once I'm able to upgrade to Kamailio 3.0 I'll switch over to memcached, which has all the benefits of a shared memory hashtable but it's also clustered. Ooh, I'm so excited!