How Discord Scaled Elixir to 5M Concurrent Users • Hacker News Board

Re: How Discord Scaled Elixir to 5M Concurrent Users

#11

Post by cutler » Tue, Jul 11, 2017, 9:55 PM UTC

myth_drannon wrote: post #6

It's interesting how on StackOverflow Jobs Elixir knowledge is required more often than Erlang. http://www.reallyhyped.com/?keywords=erlang%2Celixir

Despite its appeal to HN geeks I doubt if Elixir will ever achieve mainstream adoption. Searching Indeed.co.uk's API by title, there are only 5 Elixir jobs in London, compared with 445 Python and 171 Ruby. I also attended a Silicon Roundabout jobs fair recently and was disappointed to find Elixir wasn't even listed in the literature.

Re: How Discord Scaled Elixir to 5M Concurrent Users

#12

Post by jmcgough » Tue, Jul 11, 2017, 9:56 PM UTC

Great to see more posts like this promoting Elixir. I've been really enjoying the language and how much power it gets from BEAM.

Hopefully more companies see success stories like this and take the plunge - I'm working on an Elixir project right now at my startup and am loving it.

Re: How Discord Scaled Elixir to 5M Concurrent Users

#13

Post by orliesaurus » Tue, Jul 11, 2017, 10:02 PM UTC

Unlike Discord's design team who seem to just copy all of Slack's designs and assets, the Engineering team seems to have their shit together, it is delightful to read your Elixir blogposts. Good job!

Re: How Discord Scaled Elixir to 5M Concurrent Users

#14

Post by joonoro » Tue, Jul 11, 2017, 10:04 PM UTC

Elixir was one of the reasons I started using Discord in the first place. I figured if they were smart enough to use Elixir for a program like this then they would probably have a bright future ahead of them.

In practice, Discord hasn't been completely reliable for my group. Lately messages have been dropping out or being sent multiple times. Voice gets messed up (robot voice) at least a couple times per week and we have to switch servers to make it work again. A few times a person's voice connection has stopped working completely for several minutes and there's nothing we can do about it.

I don't know if these problems have anything to do with the Elixir backend or the server.

EDIT: Grammar

Re: How Discord Scaled Elixir to 5M Concurrent Users

#15

Post by zitterbewegung » Tue, Jul 11, 2017, 10:09 PM UTC

Compared to slack discord is a much better service for large groups . Facebook uses them for react.

Re: How Discord Scaled Elixir to 5M Concurrent Users

#16

Post by jakebasile » Tue, Jul 11, 2017, 10:09 PM UTC

I'm continually impressed with Discord and their technical blogs contribute to my respect for them. I use it in both my personal life (I run a small server for online friends, plus large game centric servers) and my professional life (instead of Slack). It's a delight to use, the voice chat is extremely high quality, text chat is fast and searchable, and notifications actually work. Discord has become the de facto place for many gaming communities to organize which is a big deal considering how discriminating and exacting PC gamers can be.

My only concern is their long term viability and I don't just mean money wise. I'm concerned they'll have to sacrifice the user experience to either achieve sustainability or consent to a buyout by a larger company that only wants the users and brand. I hope I'm wrong, and I bought a year of Nitro to do my part.

Re: How Discord Scaled Elixir to 5M Concurrent Users

#17

Post by itbeho » Tue, Jul 11, 2017, 10:10 PM UTC

cutler wrote: post #11

myth_drannon wrote: post #6

It's interesting how on StackOverflow Jobs Elixir knowledge is required more often than Erlang. http://www.reallyhyped.com/?keywords=erlang%2Celixir

Despite its appeal to HN geeks I doubt if Elixir will ever achieve mainstream adoption. Searching Indeed.co.uk's API by title, there are only 5 Elixir jobs in London, compared with 445 Python and 171 Ruby. I also attended a Silicon Roundabout jobs fair recently and was disappointed to find Elixir wasn't even listed in the literature.

It's still early. I've bet on the wrong horse (stack) before, so take my comments with a grain of salt, but I know several companies that are currently adopting Elixir/Phoenix with the same level of excitement that I recall from the early days of Ruby/Rails. It may never be "Rails big", but there is definitely some momentum building.

Re: How Discord Scaled Elixir to 5M Concurrent Users

#18

Post by jaequery » Tue, Jul 11, 2017, 10:10 PM UTC

Anyone know if Phoenix/Elixir have something similar to Ruby's bettererror gem? I see Phoenix has a built-in error stack trace page which looks like a clone of bettererror but it doesn't have the real-time console inside of it.

Also, I wish they had a ORM like Sequel. These two are really what is holding me back from going full in on Elixir. Anyone can care to comment on this?

Re: How Discord Scaled Elixir to 5M Concurrent Users

#19

Post by iagooar » Tue, Jul 11, 2017, 10:12 PM UTC

This writeup make me even more convinced of Elixir becoming one of the large players when it comes to hugely scaling applications.

If there is one thing I truly love about Elixir, it is the easiness of getting started, while standing on the shoulders of a giant that is the Erlang VM. You can start by building a simple, not very demanding application with it, yet once you hit a large scale, there is plenty of battle-proven tools to save you massive headaches and costly rewrites.

Still, I feel, that using Elixir is, today, still a large bet. You need to convince your colleagues as much as your bosses / customers to take the risk. But you can rest assured it will not fail you as you need to push it to the next level.

Nothing comes for free, and at the right scale, even the Erlang VM is not a silver bullet and will require your engineering team to invest their talent, time and effort to fine tune it. Yet, once you dig deep enough into it, you'll find plenty of ways to solve your problem at a lower cost as compared to other solutions.

I see a bright future for Elixir, and a breath of fresh air for Erlang. It's such a great time to be alive!

Re: How Discord Scaled Elixir to 5M Concurrent Users

#20

Post by Cieplak » Tue, Jul 11, 2017, 10:16 PM UTC

I know that the JVM is a modern marvel of software engineering, so I'm always surprised when my Erlang apps consume less than 10MB of RAM, start up nearly instantaneously, respond to HTTP requests in less than 10ms and run forever, while my Java apps take 2 minutes to start up, have several hundred millisecond HTTP response latency and horde memory. Granted, it's more an issue with Spring than with Java, and Parallel Universe's Quasar is basically OTP for Java, so I know logically that Java is basically a superset of Erlang at this point, but perhaps there's an element of "less is more" going on here.

Also, we're looking for Erlang folks with payments experience.

cGF0cmljaytobkBmaW5peHBheW1lbnRzLmNvbQ==