NowSMS 2009 Now Available

Posted by on Jul 10, 2009 in Support Blog

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NowSMS 2009 is the fastest performance release of NowSMS to date. While we’ve added considerable new functionality, we’ve successfully avoided the bloatware trap.

Effective immediately, licenses supporting up to 400 messages per second are available.

NowSMS 2009 is a free update for users with current upgrade and maintenance agreements. The status of your upgrade and maintenance agreement can be found on the “Serial #” page of your NowSMS installation.

The NowSMS 2009 download can be found at the following link:

https://nowsms.com/downloads/

The core performance enhancements are also of interest to other high speed, but not-quite-as-high-speed environments for a variety of reasons.

  • Requesting delivery receipts for all (or most) messages can put an increased strain on the system, with previous versions of NowSMS peaking at speeds of 150 to 200 messages per second, and sometimes with a queued backlog of receipt processing. Performance is easily doubled in this update, and the queue backlog is no more.
  • 2-way SMS command performance has been optimised, particularly for HTTP based commands, allowing an HTTP based command to easily keep up with burst rates of hundreds of messages per second.
  • CPU load with large numbers of outbound messaging routes. Historically, the more outbound routes defined to NowSMS, the higher the CPU load, especially if there is a large volume of queued messages waiting for a small number of routes. The routing logic has been dramatically improved to reduce CPU load.
  • If you use HTTP-based accounting callbacks for billing or accounting, they may be significantly limiting your overall message throughput. The new release uses HTTP keep-alive sockets and optimised logic to improve throughput when accounting callbacks are enabled.

Some of the new features include:

  • Multimedia Content Push – This is an enhancement to the Multimedia WAP Push functionality support in earlier versions of NowSMS. The new implementation supports dynamic HTML or WML content delivery packaging to support modern phone browsers that do not support WML, such as the iPhone. Sending the content links via standard text messages instead of WAP Push is also supported to make it easier to work with on North American networks, and to work with devices that don’t support WAP Push, such as the aforementioned iPhone. More information can be found here: https://nowsms.com/sending-multimedia-content-push-messages-with-nowsms
  • Enhanced SMS Message Routing Logic – Recipient address masks can now specify addresses to exclude from the selected route, in addition to the existing inclusive logic. Additionally, the SMPP service_type value can be used as a basis for SMS message routing. Some additional preliminary information can be found in the following message thread: https://nowsms.com/discus/messages/1/24460.html
  • Dynamic SMS Message Routing Callbacks – This capability is long overdue! It has been availalble for MMS message routing for some time. Essentially, the existing HTTP accounting callbacks have been extended to allow the callbacks to dynamically specify which outbound route should be used for SMS message routing. Some additional preliminary information can be found in the following mesasge thread:https://nowsms.com/discus/messages/1/23919.html
  • Explicit SMSC Routing available to SMPP Clients – Perhaps not as signicant as the other enhancements, but it is now possible to give SMPP clients connecting to NowSMS as their SMPP server more control over outbound SMSC routing if desired. Some additional preliminary information can be found in the following message thread: https://nowsms.com/discus/messages/1/24485.html
  • Throttling support for outbound MMS routing speed for external MM7, MM4 or EAIF connections.
  • Enhanced support for the “mailto:” command as used in 2-way commands for routing received SMS messages to e-mail. Additional preliminary information can be found in the following message thread:https://nowsms.com/discus/messages/1/24428.html.
  • More flexibility in controlling message retry behaviour in UCP/EMI and CIMD environments, as described in the following post: https://nowsms.com/sms-retry-error-handling-with-ucpemi-and-cimd
  • Delivery receipts are now supported for UCP/EMI and CIMD environments, with NowSMS automatically translating message receipts for those environments into SMPP format to simplify processing.
  • MMSC/MM4 Enhancements for improved real-world compatibility with more MMS interconnect services.
  • Improved Modem Handling – Especially recovery and prevention of “hung modem” scenarios.

The above list is just a sampling of a few of the features/capabilities that seemed significant to me as I typed this message. A more complete list of features and enhancements can be found in the readme file, which is posted at https://nowsms.com/discus/messages/53/41528.html.

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