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by fyfy18
2339 days ago
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I think this hits on one of my biggest complaints with the Elixir and Erlang ecosystem. As a high level toolkit for building distributed systems it's great, but if you need to do something more low level you are often left on your own using a third party library. This on it's own isn't a big deal, Ruby has the same limitations. Unfortunately the Erlang and Elixir ecosystems aren't as big as Ruby, so that often means the third party libraries aren't so battle tested and features are limited. Often then are written for one company's use case, and don't do anything outside of that. I run a SaaS product where the backend is Elixir (it's been going for 10 years, so originally written in pure Erlang) and part of it needs to do a lot of http requests. It's a bit of a unusual use case, as I need to do 1000s of requests per minute to different servers. It's not feasible to keep that many connections open, so the connection needs to be recreated each time. Using hackney (the #1 Erlang http client wrapper) I found that some requests often took much longer on average than other requests. I narrowed it down to being a problem somewhere on the client side, but Erlang doesn't provide any tooling for digging deeper into the lifecycle of a HTTP request. I figured maybe it's a problem with TLS and then found Erlang (I think its been improved in v22) had very poor performance when verifying SSL certificates, so I had to disable that. I switched to mint which is a wrapper written in pure Elixir which helped a lot, but still it a left a lot to be desired. I wrote up a quick test in Go and found doing the same requests, it didn't have any performance issues or timing oddities, and the code was much simpler. I've hbeen working on extracting that part of the system into a Go app, called via gRPC. Unfortunately there is no official gRPC library for Erlang, and the only third party one has limited features that I've had to work around. So it's a bit painful, but don't get me wrong I love using Elixir and Erlang :-) |
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What if you called it via Port instead of gRPC?
We are also using Elixir at our SaaS for more than 2 years in production. There are times (although rare) when Elixir performance is just not enough. For those cases we tend to use Rustler, which makes integration with Rust code pretty safe and straightforward. Did you consider Rust instead of Go?