It is very hard to create real and meaningful benchmarks. The "Hello world" benchmarks are very useful when writing a webserver and you are curious about where to optimize it, if necessary. Even though they are very superficial, they can also help you compare two webservers.
It is very easy to run the benchmarks on your own hardware. Get elli, then run "elli:start_link()" and hit "/hello?name=john" with apachebench or your tool of choice.
Elli is only useful if you want to write an Erlang application that exposes a HTTP API. If you want raw performance, Haskell has some servers which does 300k+ rps.
It's attitudes like this that make HN comments so dismal. Ugh.
This is an interesting tool, developed by a group of people doing interesting things, and it's been shared with the world for others to use and/or improve on.
While I'm personally not an Erlang developer, I'm grateful for others who create interesting solutions to their scaling problems. Plus, we utilize Erlang extensively at Whoosh Traffic -- anything that can inspire our developers is always welcome.
I can recreate your "writing directly to a socket" in a couple of lines of code in any language. So it means nothing to me.
The post however is about a whole new server. It's also written in an interesting language. This I might use. This I want to learn more about. I'll go on a limb here, and say that more HN people want to here about the new webserver than about how "one can do it as fast by writing to a socket".
Author of elli here.
It is very hard to create real and meaningful benchmarks. The "Hello world" benchmarks are very useful when writing a webserver and you are curious about where to optimize it, if necessary. Even though they are very superficial, they can also help you compare two webservers.
It is very easy to run the benchmarks on your own hardware. Get elli, then run "elli:start_link()" and hit "/hello?name=john" with apachebench or your tool of choice.
Elli is only useful if you want to write an Erlang application that exposes a HTTP API. If you want raw performance, Haskell has some servers which does 300k+ rps.
Here is a very good article from Steve Vinoski who is overall a very smart and experienced guy on the topic of benchmarking Erlang webservers: http://steve.vinoski.net/blog/2011/05/09/erlang-web-server-b...
Knut