“Finally, we use a few stateful, global data structures to track incoming requests and funnel them off to the right backend queues. In Erlang, the right way to

“Finally, we use a few stateful, global data structures to track incoming requests and funnel them off to the right backend queues. In Erlang, the right way to do this is to spawn off a separate set of actors to manage each data structure and message pass with them to save and retrieve data.” Nope, that’s not the right way. The way you were doing it ended up making all calls sequential and bound to single processes that could lose state. That’s not right. The best way to do it would have been to use ETS tables (which can be optimized either for parallel reads or writes), which also allows destructive updates, in order to have the best performance and memory usage possible. Note that you could then have had memory-only Mnesia table (adding transactions, sharding and distribution on top of ETS) to do it. As for string performances, I’m wondering if you used lists-as-strings, binary strings or io-lists to do your things. This can have significant impact in performance and memory use. Then again, if you had a bunch of Python and no Erlang experts, I can’t really say anything truly convincing against a language switch. Go for what your team feels good with.