[sethammons]

Elixir is not some golden ticket and in my experience still needed caching (ets and/or redis). I worked on an elixir service that topped out at around 2k requests per second with 5 servers even with some caching of the high-read/low-write flows. This was mostly limited by db cpu pressure against postgres with lots of materialized views and monstrous queries being inefficient due to over normalization and, maybe, partly affected by uuid primary keys.

I came to this system with prior experience using Go and mysql where I expected base performance of 1-5k queries per second per node before any optimizations like (non cpu) caching but also didn't use triggers or anything fancy to prevent db cpu pressure.

I got a bit rambling and perhaps a bit off topic, but elixir is not something that side steps the need for a cache when your db is maxed out.

[andy_ppp]

2000 requests per second implies your system was badly designed. If you’re saying it was mostly database bottlenecks why would that not affect the Go version in the same way?

[sethammons]

The point I attempted to make was that elixir and your caching needs are orthogonal.

However, to indulge Go vs Elixir in this context (note it was two different systems, companies, and scale referenced above): Elixir has the amazing Ecto query builder and I think poor schema design along with good tooling let folks be productive and build a couple of years of cruft into a tangled knot of table dependencies and access patterns and materialized views.

Go tends to eschew ORM like things and I believe some pressure on the devs to think more about the actual queries being (hand) generated would have exposed schema inefficiencies earlier (instead of Ecto automagically pulling all the data you need, you see the heavy lifting when writing the queries).

And to your point, with a fucked schema and or access patterns, Go vs Elixir or any other language is a moot point. Cheers!

[diamondo25]

Of course you can use an ORM with Golang, and will have reduced throughput. However, I wonder how much you can profile for both languages and fix the bottlenecks by rewriting things. It can also depend on the machine and how the VM allocates the threads and memory allocation (for example multi chiplet, multi rambank support).

[andy_ppp]

Ecto isn’t an ORM it’s two things 1) an Elixir DSL for building SQL Queries 2) Ecto.Changeset a system for validating and managing data changes before they go into your database.

I think bad database design can happen anywhere and good database design can happen in a PHP application. It’s not necessarily language dependent and always refactoring technical debt on the database design can be some of the most productive changes you can make to a service.