How to Build an SMS Service
Using a Smartphone as an SMS Modem > Tips and Tricks
8.5. Tips and Tricks
Having built several SMS services based on this architecture and operated one of them for several years, we learned a few things along the way.
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Phones Leak:Microsoft is constantly improving the Windows Mobile platform, but as of Windows Mobile 5, there were still some significant memory leaks present in the OS. As a result, we typically ran into out of memory errors after several weeks of operation. Plan on rebooting the phones every week or so to ensure your service doesn't go down unexpectedly.
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Scale: Using a smartphone SMS server implementation is intrinsically limited in scale. In my experience, the smartphone was able to send and receive approximately 30 messages per minute. Because SMS is a store and forward system, if the incoming messages get backed up, you needn't worry, they will flow down to your phone at the rate your phone can handle it. This should help you ride out any activity spikes as you scale your service up.
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International: Sending SMS messages across national boundaries can be expensive and may not be covered by your standard SMS plan (even if it is unlimited). Save yourself an unexpected phone bill and decide whether you want to filter out international messages.