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Elixir saves Pinterest $2M a year in server costs

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Re: Elixir saves Pinterest $2M a year in server costs

#11

Compared to Python. No wonder.

And to Java. That's more of a surprise. Most of the gains may have come from architecture changes though: "The combined effect of better architecture and Elixir saved Pinterest over $2 million per year in server costs".

Re: Elixir saves Pinterest $2M a year in server costs

#14
Does anyone has any followup information about the companies and people mentioned? Sadly last blog from Cory O'Daniel is from 2019 and Bleacher Report engineering blog post shows 2019 as the last post. Pinterest has 81 public repos on GitHub but only 3 with Elixir code base.

Re: Elixir saves Pinterest $2M a year in server costs

#15

Pinterest - ah that app that has hijacked all images in google search result. Created an account once but has not really used it.

While the google images thing is kinda shitty. Pinterest is really really good at image search and image recommendations.

Re: Elixir saves Pinterest $2M a year in server costs

#17
post #3

By the title alone, this means nothing. How much would it cost otherwise? What is the percentage savings? In TFA, it gets better though: "Steve: That’s pretty easy. When I started on the spam team, we had close to 1,400 servers running. When we converted several parts to Elixir, we reduced that by around 95%. One of the systems that ran on 200 Python servers now runs on four Elixir servers (it can actually run on two…

> When our notifications system was running on Java, it was on 30 c32.xl instances. When we switched over to Elixir, we could run on 15.

Would be curious to know how they tried to optimise the Java stack.

Because on every benchmark I've seen the JVM is faster in every which way than Elixir. Except for memory where often people will over-provision the JVM rather than look at where their code might be over-allocating or leaking.

Re: Elixir saves Pinterest $2M a year in server costs

#18

They could have just used different Java/Python libraries and changed the architecture for the same result. The choice of a Programming Language alone has minimal impact on performance at that scale.

Rewrite would give you a more optimized code almost always, because you know what you are writing. Though the article says that they rewrote the notification system, and erlang/elixir is pretty amazing for that stuff. From the point "memory footprint per long-running connection".

Re: Elixir saves Pinterest $2M a year in server costs

#19
post #14

Does anyone has any followup information about the companies and people mentioned? Sadly last blog from Cory O'Daniel is from 2019 and Bleacher Report engineering blog post shows 2019 as the last post. Pinterest has 81 public repos on GitHub but only 3 with Elixir code base.

Pinterest is hard to hear from, but BR definitely still use quite some elixir. We see them regularly around conferences.
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