[erlang-questions] benchmarks game harsh criticism (was Learning Erlang from the scratch)

[Isaac Gouy]

On 11/23/07 15:57, Joe Armstrong wrote:
-snip-
> An essential part of systems analysis is knowing what languages
> are good for solving specific problems. Benchmarks are useful here -
> but they hardly tell me something I don't know already.

There seems to be an endless supply of people who do not already know
and in fact find the differences surprising ;-)



-snip-
> Some of our Erlang systems have
> become market leading and have achieved amazing figures for
> reliability - despite the fact that they boot slowly,
> have appalling performance at matching regular expressions and can't
> analyse giga bytes of disk logs efficiently.
> These latter three points are irrelevant for the types of system we
build.


Slide 8 Objection: Erlang isn’t fast enough
• No competing product outperforms Ericsson’s ENGINE solution for
Telephony over packet-based networks.
• No competing product outperforms Ericsson’s Erlang based GPRS
Signalling Support Node (SGSN).
• No competing product outperforms Nortel’s Erlang-based SSL Offload
Accelerator.
• Lesson learned: it’s nearly impossible to predict system performance
based on low-level ”micro” benchmarks.
• Failure to manage complexity often kills performance.

http://www.erlang.se/workshop/2004/ulfwiger.pdf



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