What is Discord and Elixir?
How Discord Scaled Elixir to 5M Concurrent Users
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Re: How Discord Scaled Elixir to 5M Concurrent Users
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
I read it a little differently. The whole article is about how Erlang/Elixir fails at its core reason for existence (fast message passing between distributed processes) and all the complicated work-arounds they had to implement to avoid actually using this core feature of Erlang.
People tend to forget that scalability is not a binary property. You always scale up to some users, up to some architecture, up to some amount of nodes. There is no system that will scale to infinity without requiring developer intervention once business needs and application patterns start to settle in. Distributed Erlang/Elixir has known limitations . For example, the network is fully meshed, which gives you about…
Shut up and take my money! I'm sold. Thank you for this explanation.
Re: How Discord Scaled Elixir to 5M Concurrent Users
#153I really like elxir the language, but find myself strangely hamstrung by the _mix_ tool. There is only an introduction to the tool, but not a reference to all the bells and whistles of the tool. I'm not looking for extra bells and whistles, but simple stuff like pulling in a module from GitHub and incorporate it. Is there such documentation? How do you crack Mix?
The docs for Mix are decent. You can start here:
When you are trying to get help w/ a specific task, you check checkout the mix tasks docs:
https://hexdocs.pm/mix/Mix.Tasks.Deps.Get.html#content
And honestly, I often just look at the source code:
https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir/tree/master/lib/mix
The Elixir Slack channel is pretty amazing, too:
Re: How Discord Scaled Elixir to 5M Concurrent Users
#154It seems awkward to me. What if Erlang/OTP team can not guarantee message serialization compatibility across a major release? How you are going to upgrade a cluster one node at a time? What if you want to communicate with other platforms? How you are going to modify distribution protocol on a running cluster without downtime?
As soon as you introduce standard message format, then all nice features such as built-in distribution, automatic reconnect, ... are almost useless. You have to do all these manually. May be I'm missing something. Correct me if I'm wrong.
For a fast time to market it seems quite nice approach. But for a long running maintainable back-end it not enough.
Re: How Discord Scaled Elixir to 5M Concurrent Users
#155This 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-p…
It convinces me that with a selection of good devs you can hugely scale anything.
Re: How Discord Scaled Elixir to 5M Concurrent Users
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
I read it a little differently. The whole article is about how Erlang/Elixir fails at its core reason for existence (fast message passing between distributed processes) and all the complicated work-arounds they had to implement to avoid actually using this core feature of Erlang.
People tend to forget that scalability is not a binary property. You always scale up to some users, up to some architecture, up to some amount of nodes. There is no system that will scale to infinity without requiring developer intervention once business needs and application patterns start to settle in. Distributed Erlang/Elixir has known limitations . For example, the network is fully meshed, which gives you about…
What difference does it make? Erlang/OTP distribution doesn't have pluggable architecture. Sooner or later you will reach a point that you have to modify it. Then you are diverging from the original branch which makes it even more difficult to maintain it. You have to merge your additions into every release (minor or major) and test it thoroughly.
A better architecture for a distributed system has a strong composability property. It should be possible to modify every possible aspect of it on a running cluster without introducing downtime.
Write your own standard well documented distribution layer and become independent of underlying technologies.
Re: How Discord Scaled Elixir to 5M Concurrent Users
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
People tend to forget that scalability is not a binary property. You always scale up to some users, up to some architecture, up to some amount of nodes. There is no system that will scale to infinity without requiring developer intervention once business needs and application patterns start to settle in. Distributed Erlang/Elixir has known limitations . For example, the network is fully meshed, which gives you about…
What difference does it make? Erlang/OTP distribution doesn't have pluggable architecture. Sooner or later you will reach a point that you have to modify it. Then you are diverging from the original branch which makes it even more difficult to maintain it. You have to merge your additions into every release (minor or major) and test it thoroughly. A better architecture for a distributed system has a strong composabil…
I think,
1) you are misunderstanding the grand parents points. Better to have primitives that scale you to X rather than having to get to X on your own.
2) The grand parent wrote the Elixir language.
3) Making sweeping statements like "A better architecture for a distributed system has a strong composability property" is very easy.
Re: How Discord Scaled Elixir to 5M Concurrent Users
#158This 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-p…
I think the next big push in elixir is tooling around metrics. Once there are hard numbers to market to non-techies I think we'll see a large shift towards elixir.
I've recently launched https://pryin.io, an application performance monitoring tool made for Elixir and Phoenix.
It hooks into Phoenix and gives you insights into how long your request / channels take and what Ecto queries are run / how long those take. You can also manually augment pretty much anything else (background jobs, API calls, ...).
Plus it keeps track of some important BEAM metrics like memory consumption.
Re: How Discord Scaled Elixir to 5M Concurrent Users
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
What difference does it make? Erlang/OTP distribution doesn't have pluggable architecture. Sooner or later you will reach a point that you have to modify it. Then you are diverging from the original branch which makes it even more difficult to maintain it. You have to merge your additions into every release (minor or major) and test it thoroughly. A better architecture for a distributed system has a strong composabil…
I think, 1) you are misunderstanding the grand parents points. Better to have primitives that scale you to X rather than having to get to X on your own. 2) The grand parent wrote the Elixir language. 3) Making sweeping statements like "A better architecture for a distributed system has a strong composability property" is very easy.
> 1) Better to have primitives that scale you to X rather than having to get to X on your own.
For a fast time to market, I do agree with you. But if you are well established company in the market, then in most cases "do it yourself" is the best idea. Unless you have the money to call for experts to fix the problem for you.
> 2) The grand parent wrote the Elixir language.
I didn't know him, nor I care.
> 3) Making sweeping like "A better architecture for a distributed system has a strong composability property" is very easy.
I'm considering this as an excuse, than a technical argument.
Re: How Discord Scaled Elixir to 5M Concurrent Users
#160It seems awkward to me. What if Erlang/OTP team can not guarantee message serialization compatibility across a major release? How you are going to upgrade a cluster one node at a time? What if you want to communicate with other platforms? How you are going to modify distribution protocol on a running cluster without downtime? As soon as you introduce standard message format, then all nice features such as built-in di…
Distributed Erlang compatibility is guaranteed for not just one, but two major versions. You can do a standard rolling upgrade and the newer nodes will talk to older nodes just fine.
http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2011-June/05946...
Foreign nodes in C, Java, Python, etc. can also join an Erlang cluster:
http://erlang.org/doc/tutorial/cnode.html
http://erlang.org/doc/apps/jinterface/jinterface_users_guide...
That being said, a more typical architecture is to have Erlang spawn external processes and talk to them via stdio.