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Comment by joonoro | Hacker News Reader

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

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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

Two things are true about Cassandra:

It is by far the best at doing what it does

It has plenty of room for improvement

You are 100% right that it is the best at what it does.

And thank you again with helping us with that bug :) we really appreciate it.

I'm currently far down the database rabbit-hole and have to ask: What's so great about Cassandra that you can't get with CouchDB or other AP (yeah, I know...) databases?

Solid ingestion story. Very very good write throughout. Linear scaling. Easy expansion / contraction. Complete flexibility in consistency vs availability tradeoff.

And most importantly:

It actually works at scale. Huge scale. Thousand node cluster and hundreds of thousands of instances scales.

Because a good chunk of the active maintainers actually run this shit in prod.

You might want to have a look at ScyllaDB.

We are currently in the process of testing ScyllaDB with double writes for our fixed data clusters. It is very scary to transition to something so new :)

Our message storage clusters have a very large set of data that keeps increasing and using Scylla without incremental repair will suck so we are waiting on that.

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