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How Discord Scaled Elixir to 5M Concurrent Users

blog.discordapp.com

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Re: How Discord Scaled Elixir to 5M Concurrent Users

#41

Post by joonoro »

Vishnevskiy wrote: post #31
joonoro wrote: post #14

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…

The messages struggles have been sadly due to issues with Cassandra and GC pauses caused by bugs within it. We have been trying to work with the Cassandra developers to resolve these. Voice issues should not be happening. Please contact our support with more information and we will gladly investigate.

Thanks for the response, it's good to know what's causing the problems with messages and that it's being worked on. I'll try to contact support next time I have voice issues with my group.

Re: How Discord Scaled Elixir to 5M Concurrent Users

#42

Post by btown »

zitterbewegung wrote: post #15

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

I just wish they were more professional in their communications. Service went down hard this weekend and their response was a cat GIF. Hard to justify to anyone in business that they should take it seriously. A shame when their tech is such a great match for professional collaboration, and all it would take to grow it organically would be less marketing copy not more.

Re: How Discord Scaled Elixir to 5M Concurrent Users

#43

Post by weixiyen »

jakebasile wrote: post #16

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 pl…

Slack has great UI but the app just feels sluggish compared to Discord, esp initial load times.

Re: How Discord Scaled Elixir to 5M Concurrent Users

#44

Post by ben_jones »

jakebasile wrote: post #16

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 pl…

The real concern should be an acquisition by a large tech company. Reminds me of Microsoft buying Skype. A lot of enterprise companies could be interested in selling discord to their corporate clients...

Re: How Discord Scaled Elixir to 5M Concurrent Users

#45

Post by vertex-four »

bsder wrote: post #38
iagooar wrote: post #19

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-p…

> I see a bright future for Elixir, and a breath of fresh air for Erlang. Is Erlang really that much of a barrier? Erlang was a touch odd, but I didn't find the language itself that mind-bending. Wrapping my head around the proper way to structure things and the proper use of the OTP libraries was much more time-consuming. That level of architectural thought doesn't magically go away because you changed the language.…

Unfortunately, a lot of people appear to hate Erlang's syntax to the point that it's a barrier to adoption - or Elixir never would've picked up at all. I don't understand it myself, but there we have it.

Re: How Discord Scaled Elixir to 5M Concurrent Users

#46

Post by janekm »

iagooar wrote: post #19

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-p…

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.

Re: How Discord Scaled Elixir to 5M Concurrent Users

#47

Post by jmcgough »

bsder wrote: post #38
iagooar wrote: post #19

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-p…

> I see a bright future for Elixir, and a breath of fresh air for Erlang. Is Erlang really that much of a barrier? Erlang was a touch odd, but I didn't find the language itself that mind-bending. Wrapping my head around the proper way to structure things and the proper use of the OTP libraries was much more time-consuming. That level of architectural thought doesn't magically go away because you changed the language.…

It became open source in the 90s. It's been used by several high-traffic sites/apps to support chat clients (Riot Games, WhatsApp, and I think Fetlife), but outside of that has seen very little adoption.

I think it's a lot harder to sell people on a language that looks syntactically unintelligible to a lot of web developers. Most people I know working with Elixir now are/were Rubyists, so it's easy for them to make the leap from that and start to understand all of the awesome things they get from BEAM and OTP.

Re: How Discord Scaled Elixir to 5M Concurrent Users

#48

Post by orliesaurus »

orliesaurus wrote: post #13

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!

yeah go on with the downvotes, you know everyone's thinking what I said! Copying your way to success is a strategy and it's not the first time either way :)

Re: How Discord Scaled Elixir to 5M Concurrent Users

#49

Post by notnight »

btown wrote: post #42
zitterbewegung wrote: post #15

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

I just wish they were more professional in their communications. Service went down hard this weekend and their response was a cat GIF. Hard to justify to anyone in business that they should take it seriously. A shame when their tech is such a great match for professional collaboration, and all it would take to grow it organically would be less marketing copy not more.

We take outages seriously internally, but users generally don't care about the nitty-gritty. For a full, detailed postmortem on that outage you can check out our status site: https://status.discordapp.com/incidents/ywdwttd6b0hg

Re: How Discord Scaled Elixir to 5M Concurrent Users

#50

Post by Vishnevskiy »

joonoro wrote: post #41
Vishnevskiy wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The messages struggles have been sadly due to issues with Cassandra and GC pauses caused by bugs within it. We have been trying to work with the Cassandra developers to resolve these. Voice issues should not be happening. Please contact our support with more information and we will gladly investigate.

Thanks for the response, it's good to know what's causing the problems with messages and that it's being worked on. I'll try to contact support next time I have voice issues with my group.

:) np

We love Cassandra, and hate it at the same time.

Check out this nasty bug we got. https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-13004

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