[erlang-questions] clueless performance question

Ulf Wiger (TN/EAB) ulf.wiger@REDACTED
Wed Jun 11 00:54:45 CEST 2008


Christian S skrev:

> I would find research into what can be won by doing JIT interesting,
> things like avoiding external-call lookups by compiling it into a
> direct call (constraint it so it needs to be re-done when modules are
> replaced). 

You could e.g. read Thomas Lindgren's paper on cross-module
optimization:

http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/458295.html

One of the things debated in connection with that work was
the idea that we could opt for larger units of upgrade
(normally, it makes sense to upgrade whole applications),
and this could possibly open up for more agressive cross-
module optimizations.

Having a more expressive way of providing type restrictions
also seems to be a way to speed up the code. Even today,
speedups can be had by adding type guards at the right
places (most notably perhaps for floating-point math).

Of course, in many of the micro benchmarks where Erlang
suffers, the key to high performance seems to be the
ability to perform blocking IO. This problem may become
less of an issue if we start benchmarking on multicores,
where it may be possible to do such things and still not
jeopardize real-time characteristics.

BR,
Ulf W



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