[erlang-questions] About Erlang system performance

[Fred Hebert]

We've used HiPE in parts of our system that required tight fast loops. 
Whenever we need something to go fast due to some algorithmic 
complexity, /and/ that we can manage to isolate it as a single unit that 
doesn't need to call to non-HiPE code, we will try to convert it.

Basically, I've been told that HiPE and Beam have some overhead when it 
comes to switching from one to the other. When we have a bit of code 
that is a hotspot, I'll try to inline whatever calls are made to other 
modules (mostly lists), compile only that module with HiPE, and let it 
do its thing. Sometimes benchmarks go in HiPE's favour, sometimes not.

In a particular instance of our stack, it gave us nearly 2x speedup on 
loop & search operations that frequently happen more than 50,000 times 
per second. Definitely worth it, and it's been running in production for 
months, just for that single module.

On 12-11-09 8:45 AM, Valentin Micic wrote:
> Interestingly enough, this was a kind of conclusion we've arrived at 
> as well -- the good performance of Beam, combined with "perceived 
> instability", acted as a serious deterrent for me.
> But Max, wouldn't you like to know if there are any brave souls out 
> there that were prepared to go beyond perceptions and successfully 
> tried it in "real-life" situation?
>
> V/
>
>
> On 09 Nov 2012, at 3:34 PM, Max Bourinov wrote:
>
>> Unrelated, but: we were considering to give a try to HiPE but so far 
>> there is no need to do it for us because Beam outperforms everything 
>> else in our problem domain.
>>
>>
>> Best regards,
>> Max
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Nov 9, 2012 at 5:16 PM, Valentin Micic <valentin@REDACTED 
>> <mailto:valentin@REDACTED>> wrote:
>>
>>     Unrelated, but would be interesting to find out -- are there any
>>     commercial-grade (let alone carrier-grade) systems that take
>>     advantage of HiPE?
>>
>>
>>     V/
>>
>>     On 09 Nov 2012, at 2:11 PM, Schneider wrote:
>>
>>     > you're right. HIPE generates compiled code.
>>     > my mistake.
>>     > take a look here for more info's about HIPE:
>>     > http://user.it.uu.se/~kostis/Papers/erlang03.pdf
>>     <http://user.it.uu.se/%7Ekostis/Papers/erlang03.pdf>
>>     >
>>     > greatz Johannes
>>     >
>>     >
>>     > On Fr 09 Nov 2012 13:07:49 CET, Matti Oinas wrote:
>>     >> Correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't HIPE compile to native code?
>>     >>
>>     >> --
>>     >> Matti
>>     >>
>>     >> On Fri, Nov 9, 2012 at 1:57 PM, Schneider <js@REDACTED
>>     <mailto:js@REDACTED>> wrote:
>>     >>> Erlang is a language, which produced byte-code which get'
>>     interpreted by the
>>     >>> Erlang engine. C++ instead generates mashing-code which has
>>     on the one hand
>>     >>> a much better performance, on the other hand,
>>     >>> some disadvantages like incompatibility between different OSs.
>>     >>>
>>     >>> greatz Johannes
>>     >>>
>>     >>>
>>     >>> On Fr 09 Nov 2012 09:42:21 CET, hume npx wrote:
>>     >>>>
>>     >>>> Hi, all:
>>     >>>>   I'am new to erlang, after investigate some benchmark such
>>     as at
>>     >>>>
>>     http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64q/which-programs-are-fastest.php,
>>     >>>> I found that erlang compiler is not so good at speed? the
>>     benchmark
>>     >>>> shows that erlang Hipe is 13x slowdown compared to C++, as
>>     compared to
>>     >>>> Haskell GHC (3.3x slowdown), go 2.98x slowdown or even
>>     javascript v8
>>     >>>> is about 1x faster than erlang, I investigated the erLLVM
>>     project
>>     >>>> which reported similar results to Hipe, you know performance
>>     is so
>>     >>>> important nowadays, what caused the hard to improve
>>     performace of
>>     >>>> erlang or just there are not people working on it? Erlang is
>>     >>>> attractive to me after several days studying, but with great
>>     >>>> performance will be more attractive and competitive to some
>>     languages
>>     >>>> such as go etc.
>>     >>>>
>>     >>>>
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