[erlang-questions] Strings and Text Processing

Thu Jan 3 00:25:22 CET 2013

Hi,

I'm not sure I understand your 20.000 files example. Are you suggesting that the user should limit the number of erlang processes to the number of cores or are you suggesting that the VM compresses the erlang process data when not running? That would be really nice if it can be done with only a small performance penalty, say 10-20%.

In my case I start 50.000 to 100.000 processes , one per file (it's an (map reduce like) application to do feature extraction for some machine learning algorithms) . One erlang node uses about 7GB of memory. I can probably tune it a bit (a lot?) more by using binaries but it would be nice to have an option to compress process data when not running, for people that are lazy/not an erlang expert/does not have that much time (my case)/or just as an indication of how much memory that could be saved by using binaries.

JK

________________________________
 From: Joe Armstrong <erlang@REDACTED>
To: Dmitry Kolesnikov <dmkolesnikov@REDACTED> 
Cc: Steve Davis <steven.charles.davis@REDACTED>; Erlang Questions <erlang-questions@REDACTED> 
Sent: Saturday, December 29, 2012 4:30 PM
Subject: Re: [erlang-questions] Strings and Text Processing

On Sat, Dec 29, 2012 at 3:20 PM, Dmitry Kolesnikov <dmkolesnikov@REDACTED> wrote:

Hello Steve,
>
>You have raised a good point here.
>One more reason for binary is memory consumption and IPC overhead.
>

The point about memory consumption is raised *many* times - on a modern
machine this is not a problem.

Example: I am working on a text file of 84KB - in a 32 bit Erlang we use
8 bytes/character - so I use 0.6 MB - I have 4GB memory - so I use 0.015% of
memory - ie no problem.

My strategy is to keep large strings as binaries when I'm not working on them,
turn them into lists in order to work on them, and turn them back into binaries
when I'm done. Just because a string starts off in a binary does not mean
that it has to stay as a binary as you work on it.

Imagine I have a lot of text files, say each of 50KB, I can store 20 per/MB or
20,000 files per GB. Assume I have a quad core. I can only work on four things
at the same time - so having (say) 20,000 files (at 50K) and work on four of them
(unpacked) at a time is another 1.6 Meg.

Gigabyte memories mean (among other things) what saving the odd byte here are there is hardly relevant.

On another hand list allows to represent a code point per element.
>

yes - the convenience of having one character per list element far outweighs
the space saving of storing strings in binaries

iolists are also very handy to dynamically compose a complex strings.
>
>I am afraid that this is an application specific questions… However, I tend to use binary for strings...
>
>

My strings change form depending on what I'm doing. Sometimes they are
binaries, sometimes lists, sometimes trees, ...

Cheers

/Joe

- Dmitry
>
>
>
>On Dec 29, 2012, at 4:08 PM, Steve Davis <steven.charles.davis@REDACTED> wrote:
>
>> Disclaimer :-) All the below is prefixed by a big IMHO
>>
>> Erlang has been correctly criticized for the difficulty of handling "strings".
>>
>> There are two reasons for this (fundamental decisions that were taken way-back-when):
>> 1) "strings" are "just lists of integers"
>> 2) "strings" are by default latin-1 representations
>>
>> This introduces major inconveniences, some of which are not resolvable:
>> When faced with any list during pattern matching, it is not at all easy to determine whether that list is a "string".
>> Further, since strings are "only" a subset of the set of lists of integers, it can be impossible to determine programmatically whether the list is a list of integers or is meant to represent a string. Determining whether a particular list even qualifies as a string in a program requires non-trivial processing of the entire list.
>>
>> It's rather unfortunate that Erlang has earned this reputation, since the truth is that Erlang is truly excellent at text processing. However, to benefit from this excellence, you need to do two things:
>> 1) Represent and process text as binaries.
>> 2) Assume that the text binary is UTF-8 encoded, unless otherwise stated (meaning, e.g. #text{encoding = cstring, value = <<116,101,120,116,0>>}).
>>
>> Suddenly, thanks to binary syntax and pattern matching, processing text in your programs becomes deterministic and easy. (Note that part of the reason for this is that binaries are "expected" to be opaque, whereas general list processing is fundamental to writing any program in Erlang).
>>
>> There's a couple of minor drawbacks, both of which are the result of the initial decisions about "strings":
>> 1) The code is littered with additional angle brackets <<"string">> (annoying, but definitely worth the inconvenience)
>> 2) The standard Erlang/OTP library functions require textual arguments as lists (requiring overuse of binary_to_list)
>>
>> And there are further benefits:
>> 1) Parsing/transcoding different charset encodings is far more straightforward
>> 2) Internationalization/localization is far more straightfoward
>>
>> I wonder if, had the current binary pattern matching/comprehensions been available "way-back-when", whether the decision about "string" representation in Erlang may have been different. (i.e. <<116,101,120,116>> = "text").
>>
>> Finally, here's my two questions:
>> 1) Is there any benefit at all to the "list representation" of strings above binary text?
>> 2) If not, I wonder if there's any way to change our minds about "strings" as we enter 2013?
>>
>> regs,
>> /s
>>
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