[erlang-questions] Misultin EOL

[Garrett Smith]

On Thu, Feb 16, 2012 at 3:17 PM, Steve Vinoski <vinoski@REDACTED> wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 16, 2012 at 3:50 PM, Michael Truog <mjtruog@REDACTED> wrote:
>> Is cowboy going to be able to take the lead on HTTP Erlang web server performance where mochiweb and yaws have been unable to (please don't bother to flame this, those people that don't care about performance, but care about Erlang)?
>
> I'm not interested in flames either, but I am interested in facts.
> Please back up your assertion by posting your meaningful benchmarks
> that prove that Yaws is lacking in performance.

FWIW, I spent some time looking at HTTP servers a couple years ago in
developing Landshark [1], which uses Mochiweb.

I found that *any* Erlang HTTP server, and certainly YAWs, was
decisively both faster and more resilient to faults than the other
language environment options I looked at, which the exception of
mod_php, which also fared very well. [2]

That said, I place little credence in these sorts of benchmarks. They
provide data, but it's not always clear what you can correctly infer
from them. We do have a tendency to get our rulers out and start
measuring, even if what we're measuring is completely pointless [3].

I've also observed that developers will, for whatever reason, go to
incredible lengths to eek out even the slightest performance gains in
the web tier [4]. In every large scale Web application I've seen
though, the web tier is not a bottleneck -- it's the data tier that
gives us fits. Of course there are exceptions, but if performance is
that critical, there's C!

Garrett

[1] Landshark was my first Erlang project and is now totally defunct.
I'm a proponent of modlib - https://github.com/gar1t/modlib - which is
a supplement to Erlang's built in httpd server.

[2] https://github.com/gar1t/landshark/blob/master/doc/benchmarks.txt

[3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEJ1n13soWU

[4] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzkRVzciAZg