big erlang web solution

[ke han]

On Jun 22, 2006, at 8:37 PM, bryan rasmussen wrote:

> Hi, I've decided to work on a new web site project and I've decided to
> use Erlang for it.
>
> The reason for using Erlang is two fold:
>
> 1. I want to have fun making the project.
> 2. The site has to be extremely scalable. Although I might not move it
> out to large scale work I want it to be able to handle it.
>
> Other requirements I have are as follows:
>
> 1. Will be hosted on a linux machine. Does anyone have any notes on
> performance of Erlang and also Yaws on different 'brands' of linux.

As to performance, I doubt you will find substantial performance  
differences between different linux distros (assuming same kernel and  
use of epoll if appropriate to your app).  That said, I have had lots  
of success with erlang/yaws on freeBSD 6.1.  The kpoll (equivalent to  
epoll on linux) is built into freeBSD and is used by default from the  
erlang ports installation.
The performance of your app will be mostly due to your overall app  
design, not the OS kernel as both the linux and BSD kernels are quite  
sufficient for erlang scaling.
I bring up freeBSD 6.1 because I have it found it a much more  
carefully managed _server_ OS than any of the major linux distros.

>
> 2. I will want to have use a distributed filesystem instead of
> database to access data. Any good recommendations in this context.
> Database will still probably be used to hold pointers to specific data
> but data will be in filesystem.

I have similar needs in the near future.  My desire is to use mensia  
for my main OLTP data store and have a filesystem store for  
documents.  I need full text search and easy admin for this file  
system document store.  If you find a product that does this, please  
let me know.

good luck, ke han

>
>
> Cheers,
> Bryan Rasmussen