Yariv’s Blog

I just came across this blog post: http://www.satine.org/archives/2007/12/13/amazon-simpledb/. The author got the scoop that Amazon’s just-released SimpleDB runs on Erlang. This is actually the second Amazon Web Service that runs on Erlang — at least, if the rumors I’ve heard that Amazon SQS was built with Erlang as well are true (update: I found the reference in this article).

It’s pretty cool knowing that you can use the same language that powers some of the massive systems that Amazon and Ericsson have built to whip up a blog app just as easily as in Ruby or Python. (But if you built it in Erlang/ErlyWeb, you could also use Comet to make the blog update itself in real time, resting assured that horizontal scalability is just a matter of reconfiguring your Mnesia schema :) ).

Amazon SimpleDB is a game changer. It fills the last hole in making Amazon Web Services a complete environment for elastic, scalable web application hosting: the need for a fast, reliable data store. Together with S3 and EC2, SimpleDB makes it feasible for small startups to scale like the big companies but without the operational overhead. What a great set of products from Amazon.

Vimagi was much slower than it should have been.

I had foolishly compiled Vimagi in production with {auto_compile, true}. This option tells ErlyWeb to scan the app’s source files and recompile all the ones that have changed since the last request. This feature greatly speeds up development because you can edit your file, reload the page, and immediately see the effects of your changes. It was also convenient for me in production because after checking in some changes from my dev box I would just ’svn up’ on the production server and the changes will be deployed automatically. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize what a negative impact it has on performance. Thankfully, David King brought this to my attention on the ErlyWeb mailing list and I’ve since disabled auto_compile on the production server.

Vimagi performs much better now. Clicking around the site, most pages now load in 0.3 - 0.5 secs according to YSlow. It feels much faster. In fact, Vimagi’s performance is now similar to BeerRiot’s, which is no small feat.

By the way, I’m not sure about BeerRiot, but Vimagi’s pages are all dynamically generated — I haven’t implemented any caching (my VPS can easily handle the current traffic levels, so implmeneting caching right now would be a premature optimization). For an entirely dynamic site, I think this is very good performance.

Who cares if Erlang starts slowly - it was designed to start once and never stop - we have systems that have run for 5 years - a two seconds start-up time amortized over 5 years is not *too* bad.

- Joe Armstrong

(From http://www.nabble.com/idea%3A-service-pack-one-tf4800752.html#a13735173)

The BayFP group is on a roll: 3 presentations on functional web development frameworks in 3 months. Alex Jacobson presented HAppS, David Pollak presented Lift, and in the next meeting I’ll be presenting ErlyWeb.

The meeting will take place on Dec. 6th in Berkeley. You can find directions here.

There will be a $300 attendance fee.

Just kidding — it’s free. Please attend.

I’m going to the BayFP meeting tomorrow. David Pollack will present lift, the web framework he created for Scala. Anyone who’s interested is welcome to attend.

WF II: Erlang Blues (9/22)

Dear Erlang I: · I like you. Really, I do. But until you can read lines of text out of a file and do basic pattern-matching against them acceptably fast (which most people would say is faster than Ruby), you’re stuck in a niche; you’re a thought experiment and a consciousness-raiser and an engineering showpiece, but you’re not a general-purpose tool. Sorry.

WF XI: Results (10/30)

Erlang 6.46
Ruby 50.16
…
Analysis · Are you kidding me!?!? Getouttahere. Maybe someday.

I moved my blog to a different hosting provider. Please let me know if you notice any URLs that the move may have broken.

I also removed that annoying CAPTCHA plugin so you shouldn’t have problems leaving comments from now on. If the plugin prevented you from leaving comments in the past you can now go ahead and leave them now. (I may have to put CAPTCHA back if Akismet flakes out on me but I hope I won’t have to resort to that.)

I apologize for any inconvenience.