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Elixir is not a fast language. Not even close. Yes, it handles concurrency and parallelism beautifully which in turn enable distributed applications to perform

Elixir is not a fast language. Not even close. Yes, it handles concurrency and parallelism beautifully which in turn enable distributed applications to perform quite well. But the language itself is significantly slower than Crystal / Rust / Go / Swift. It's not in the same category at all. That said, it's a great language worth recommending.

clessg 10y ago
Oops, you're right that Elixir is not a computationally fast language. If you're looking for fast, raw number-crunching, look elsewhere. That said, real-world performance tends to be extremely good for real-time and networked applications (read: web apps). It's common for requests to be handled in microseconds, even in development.
- continuations 10y ago
  Is Elixir really fast for web apps though? According to the web framework benchmark [1] the performance of Elixir is pretty bad - it's consistently slower than python and ruby frameworks. [1] https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r12&hw=peak&test=fortune https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r12&hw=...
  - rdtsc 10y ago
    It is hard to say how they measure and what they measure. According to their "multiple queries" benchmark, which I guess is the real world one? (Unless everyone expects all custumers to line up and send their requests one after another one). https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r12&hw=peak&test=query https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r12&hw=... we should all be using Dart on the server coupled with MongoDB perhaps.
    - Scarbutt 10y ago
      The Dart vm is pretty damn fast, way faster for any CPU bound stuff than the BEAM.
      - rdtsc 10y ago
        Faster than C++, Java, Go?
      - igouy 10y ago
        http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/compare.php?lang=dart&lang2=hipe http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/compare.php?lan... as-in FAQ 1.4 "What sort of problems is Erlang not particularly suitable for? … The most common class of 'less suitable' problems is characterised by performance being a prime requirement and constant-factors having a large effect on performance. Typical examples are image processing, signal processing, sorting large volumes of data and low-level protocol termination."
  - sanswork 10y ago
    Chris McCord said the following on reddit after the results came out: "We don't know what caused the errors and unfortunately we didn't have a chance to collaborate with them on a true run. A few months ago they added Phoenix in a preview, but it was a very poor implementation. They were testing JSON benchmarks through the :browser pipeline, complete with crsf token generation. They had a dev DB pool size of 10, where other frameworks were given of pool size of 100. And they also had heavy IO logging, where other frameworks did no logging. We sent a PR to address these issues, and I was hoping to see true results in the latest runs, but no preview was provided this time and we weren't able to work with them on the errors. tldr; these results are not representative of the framework." From my personal experience going from Rails/Sinatra to Phoenix it feels a lot faster but I haven't done any benchmarks so take that with a grain of salt.
  - asdf1234 10y ago
    Erlang/Elixir is much, much faster than either Python or Ruby especially when it comes to workloads like your typical web app. In the Techempower benchmarks the Phoenix tests had a ton of errors and there was no preview run so whoever submitted them wasn't able to fix them. Look at the error column. I assume they'll be fixed in the next run.
    - continuations 10y ago
      Error isn't why Elixir performed poorly in the web framework benchmark. Take a look at the "Single Query" test [1]. The entry for Elli has zero error and is still slower than many Python & Ruby frameworks. [1]: https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r12&hw=peak&test=db https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r12&hw=...
      - clessg 10y ago
        Honestly that site's benchmarks have never been accurate for me in production. But that's how benchmarks work I guess - my bad for bringing up benchmarks! My experience with using Elixir/Phoenix for web applications has been extremely positive performance-wise however, and has surpassed or matched Go, Ruby, PHP, and Python consistently in all production scenarios. For the latter three, the difference has been order-of-magnitude. It depends on the problem domain as always. If you're doing a lot of naïve single-threaded number-crunching, have fun. But Elixir/Phoenix haven't failed me for web applications, even in very intensive situations. It's the first time I've barely had to do any tuning beyond external factors such as network and database queries (which, by the way, Phoenix's Ecto handles very gracefully and explicitly). This is my experience with every Elixir/Phoenix app I've worked on thus far. I apologize if I made it sound like some sort of universal truth.
rdtsc 10y ago
> Elixir is not a fast language. Depends what we mean by fast. I have seen Erlang VM handle 100k requests per second on a distributed cluster. That's plenty fast. Moreover, because of fault tolerance, it means ability to have a better uptime, with less people on-call. "Fast" can also be measured to include that, if system goes 200k requests per second, but crashes at midnight and stays down for a few hours, the average "speed" can be quite low. In a laptop demo that's not visible, but in practice that's money and customers lost. But if fast means, "let's multiple some matrices", then yeah can probably use Rust or C for that. It all depends on the problem domain.
- Scarbutt 10y ago
  I have seen Erlang VM handle 100k requests per second on a distributed cluster A single JVM server can do that load, scaling and providing fault tolerance for a server that just accepts requests is trivial these days, also, if your requests do computationally intensive stuff you are going to have a very bad time with Erlang. It all depends on the problem domain. Exactly, and the domain for Elixir/Erlang is way more niche and specialized than applicable domains of other languages. I don't have anything against Elixir but part of its crowd just advertises it as the best thing for everything.
  - ken47 10y ago
    The Erlang VM (modified) has supported over 2M concurrent connections: https://blog.whatsapp.com/196/1-million-is-so-2011 https://blog.whatsapp.com/196/1-million-is-so-2011? Furthermore, assuming each request is mapped to an Erlang process, each of them get their own VM -- no stop-the-world.
    - ken47 10y ago
      Correction: I meant to say each of them get their own GC, not VM.
  - eggy 10y ago
    LFE (Lisp Flavored Erlang) is a great alternative to Elixir if you prefer Lisp over Ruby syntax. Pony lang is looking to enter the BEAM/OTP arena with its own implementation of supervisors and such. It is actor-based, OOP and is supposedly very fast in the distributed niche.
duaneb 10y ago
I'm not sure why you're grouping those four languages as they overlap very little. Go has latency and emphasizes network bound services (and randomly docker for some reason, I'm sure a good one); rust is a c replacement; swift is for writing iOS/Mac apps; and crystal is a newborn. I'd actually call it quite close to go: a high emphasis on concurrency and services. Single thread performance matters much less when scaling horizontally is mandatory to smooth latency spikes, and I'm betting on io bound work erlang would be competitive with go. I've never used elixir but I assume it has a similar performance profile to erlang as it shares the vm.
- acangiano 10y ago
  I listed a few examples of emerging languages to clarify that Elixir is not in the same class when it comes to computational performance on a single machine. The performance profile is indeed Erlang-like. Keep also in mind that my reply was within the context of a thread on Crystal. OP sort of sold Elixir as a fast language that we can use now while we wait for Crystal to mature. My point is not that Elixir is useless. My point is that we must not oversell Elixir as a fast language. Generally speaking, it isn't. It excels at horizontal scaling, which is great, but I wouldn't call it "fast" without proper qualifiers.
  - duaneb 10y ago
    Yup, this makes sense. Sorry for the confusion.
- clouddrover 10y ago
  > swift is for writing iOS/Mac apps I think that's a little simplistic. It's true that it's early days for cross platform Swift but clear progress is being made: 1. https://swift.org/download/ https://swift.org/download/ 2. https://github.com/SwiftAndroid https://github.com/SwiftAndroid 3. https://github.com/tinysun212/swift-windows https://github.com/tinysun212/swift-windows 4. https://swiftforwindows.codeplex.com/ https://swiftforwindows.codeplex.com/ Better cross platform support is a goal of Swift 3.0: https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution
andy_ppp 10y ago
Okay so the given example where on my machine elixir does the calculation of the the fibonacci number in 12.25s but if you add in HiPE and compile to native code in that module it's much closer to crystal than you might expect at 3.34s. Not bad really for a language that's meant to be slow at computational stuff :^) @compile [:native, {:hipe, [:verbose, :o3]}]
klibertp 10y ago
Hm, what about HiPE and ability to natively compile Erlang modules? That's pretty solid technology by now (I think?) and it promised some good results last time I checked. Honestly asking - I did quite a few things with Erlang and a little less with Elixir, but never even tried to use them for raw speed, instead delegating number crunching to other processes via ports.

clessg 10y ago

Oops, you're right that Elixir is not a computationally fast language. If you're looking for fast, raw number-crunching, look elsewhere. That said, real-world performance tends to be extremely good for real-time and networked applications (read: web apps). It's common for requests to be handled in microseconds, even in development.

continuations 10y ago
Is Elixir really fast for web apps though? According to the web framework benchmark [1] the performance of Elixir is pretty bad - it's consistently slower than python and ruby frameworks. [1] https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r12&hw=peak&test=fortune https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r12&hw=...
- rdtsc 10y ago
  It is hard to say how they measure and what they measure. According to their "multiple queries" benchmark, which I guess is the real world one? (Unless everyone expects all custumers to line up and send their requests one after another one). https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r12&hw=peak&test=query https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r12&hw=... we should all be using Dart on the server coupled with MongoDB perhaps.
  - Scarbutt 10y ago
    The Dart vm is pretty damn fast, way faster for any CPU bound stuff than the BEAM.
    - rdtsc 10y ago
      Faster than C++, Java, Go?
    - igouy 10y ago
      http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/compare.php?lang=dart&lang2=hipe http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/compare.php?lan... as-in FAQ 1.4 "What sort of problems is Erlang not particularly suitable for? … The most common class of 'less suitable' problems is characterised by performance being a prime requirement and constant-factors having a large effect on performance. Typical examples are image processing, signal processing, sorting large volumes of data and low-level protocol termination."
- sanswork 10y ago
  Chris McCord said the following on reddit after the results came out: "We don't know what caused the errors and unfortunately we didn't have a chance to collaborate with them on a true run. A few months ago they added Phoenix in a preview, but it was a very poor implementation. They were testing JSON benchmarks through the :browser pipeline, complete with crsf token generation. They had a dev DB pool size of 10, where other frameworks were given of pool size of 100. And they also had heavy IO logging, where other frameworks did no logging. We sent a PR to address these issues, and I was hoping to see true results in the latest runs, but no preview was provided this time and we weren't able to work with them on the errors. tldr; these results are not representative of the framework." From my personal experience going from Rails/Sinatra to Phoenix it feels a lot faster but I haven't done any benchmarks so take that with a grain of salt.
- asdf1234 10y ago
  Erlang/Elixir is much, much faster than either Python or Ruby especially when it comes to workloads like your typical web app. In the Techempower benchmarks the Phoenix tests had a ton of errors and there was no preview run so whoever submitted them wasn't able to fix them. Look at the error column. I assume they'll be fixed in the next run.
  - continuations 10y ago
    Error isn't why Elixir performed poorly in the web framework benchmark. Take a look at the "Single Query" test [1]. The entry for Elli has zero error and is still slower than many Python & Ruby frameworks. [1]: https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r12&hw=peak&test=db https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r12&hw=...
    - clessg 10y ago
      Honestly that site's benchmarks have never been accurate for me in production. But that's how benchmarks work I guess - my bad for bringing up benchmarks! My experience with using Elixir/Phoenix for web applications has been extremely positive performance-wise however, and has surpassed or matched Go, Ruby, PHP, and Python consistently in all production scenarios. For the latter three, the difference has been order-of-magnitude. It depends on the problem domain as always. If you're doing a lot of naïve single-threaded number-crunching, have fun. But Elixir/Phoenix haven't failed me for web applications, even in very intensive situations. It's the first time I've barely had to do any tuning beyond external factors such as network and database queries (which, by the way, Phoenix's Ecto handles very gracefully and explicitly). This is my experience with every Elixir/Phoenix app I've worked on thus far. I apologize if I made it sound like some sort of universal truth.

rdtsc 10y ago

> Elixir is not a fast language. Depends what we mean by fast. I have seen Erlang VM handle 100k requests per second on a distributed cluster. That's plenty fast. Moreover, because of fault tolerance, it means ability to have a better uptime, with less people on-call. "Fast" can also be measured to include that, if system goes 200k requests per second, but crashes at midnight and stays down for a few hours, the average "speed" can be quite low. In a laptop demo that's not visible, but in practice that's money and customers lost. But if fast means, "let's multiple some matrices", then yeah can probably use Rust or C for that. It all depends on the problem domain.

Scarbutt 10y ago
I have seen Erlang VM handle 100k requests per second on a distributed cluster A single JVM server can do that load, scaling and providing fault tolerance for a server that just accepts requests is trivial these days, also, if your requests do computationally intensive stuff you are going to have a very bad time with Erlang. It all depends on the problem domain. Exactly, and the domain for Elixir/Erlang is way more niche and specialized than applicable domains of other languages. I don't have anything against Elixir but part of its crowd just advertises it as the best thing for everything.
- ken47 10y ago
  The Erlang VM (modified) has supported over 2M concurrent connections: https://blog.whatsapp.com/196/1-million-is-so-2011 https://blog.whatsapp.com/196/1-million-is-so-2011? Furthermore, assuming each request is mapped to an Erlang process, each of them get their own VM -- no stop-the-world.
  - ken47 10y ago
    Correction: I meant to say each of them get their own GC, not VM.
- eggy 10y ago
  LFE (Lisp Flavored Erlang) is a great alternative to Elixir if you prefer Lisp over Ruby syntax. Pony lang is looking to enter the BEAM/OTP arena with its own implementation of supervisors and such. It is actor-based, OOP and is supposedly very fast in the distributed niche.

duaneb 10y ago

I'm not sure why you're grouping those four languages as they overlap very little. Go has latency and emphasizes network bound services (and randomly docker for some reason, I'm sure a good one); rust is a c replacement; swift is for writing iOS/Mac apps; and crystal is a newborn. I'd actually call it quite close to go: a high emphasis on concurrency and services. Single thread performance matters much less when scaling horizontally is mandatory to smooth latency spikes, and I'm betting on io bound work erlang would be competitive with go. I've never used elixir but I assume it has a similar performance profile to erlang as it shares the vm.

acangiano 10y ago
I listed a few examples of emerging languages to clarify that Elixir is not in the same class when it comes to computational performance on a single machine. The performance profile is indeed Erlang-like. Keep also in mind that my reply was within the context of a thread on Crystal. OP sort of sold Elixir as a fast language that we can use now while we wait for Crystal to mature. My point is not that Elixir is useless. My point is that we must not oversell Elixir as a fast language. Generally speaking, it isn't. It excels at horizontal scaling, which is great, but I wouldn't call it "fast" without proper qualifiers.
- duaneb 10y ago
  Yup, this makes sense. Sorry for the confusion.
clouddrover 10y ago
> swift is for writing iOS/Mac apps I think that's a little simplistic. It's true that it's early days for cross platform Swift but clear progress is being made: 1. https://swift.org/download/ https://swift.org/download/ 2. https://github.com/SwiftAndroid https://github.com/SwiftAndroid 3. https://github.com/tinysun212/swift-windows https://github.com/tinysun212/swift-windows 4. https://swiftforwindows.codeplex.com/ https://swiftforwindows.codeplex.com/ Better cross platform support is a goal of Swift 3.0: https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution

andy_ppp 10y ago

Okay so the given example where on my machine elixir does the calculation of the the fibonacci number in 12.25s but if you add in HiPE and compile to native code in that module it's much closer to crystal than you might expect at 3.34s. Not bad really for a language that's meant to be slow at computational stuff :^) @compile [:native, {:hipe, [:verbose, :o3]}]

klibertp 10y ago

Hm, what about HiPE and ability to natively compile Erlang modules? That's pretty solid technology by now (I think?) and it promised some good results last time I checked. Honestly asking - I did quite a few things with Erlang and a little less with Elixir, but never even tried to use them for raw speed, instead delegating number crunching to other processes via ports.