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Comment by Scarbutt | Hacker News Reader

For single a web api server Elixir is going to be far behind, performance wise, against nodejs, the JVM and Go. Their big feature is reliability/clustering but in the context of web requests, scaling them is real easy today, just use a load balancer. For me Erlang/Elixir have very specific niche use cases(at which it excels at) but its fans confuse beginners promoting it as a "general purpose language" that they should use it for everything.

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> For single a web api server Elixir is going to be far behind, performance wise, against nodejs, the JVM and Go.

To some Go web api frameworks perhaps.

To the JVM, not really. The frameworks I used with it in the past (spring/play/coupleOtherSmallOnes) are throttled to the number of threads for concurrent connections. The BEAM (Erlang/Elixir) has no such limitation and it blew away my old Java servers handily just due to its concurrency alone.

And not to nodejs at all. Running a single BEAM vs a single node there is no comparison, the BEAM runs circles around it. With nodejs you can shard it out to multiple running instances to get concurrency better but you run into OS limits far before the workload that the BEAM can handle.

I have a hard time believing it's faster than a JVM solution, especially since you think Go is categorically faster than the JVM.

For example, Jetty will beat every HTTP hello-world you can write in Go. I know because I've tried to beat Jetty in Go.

I believe what Overmind meant was that a single request in another language can probably beat Elixir in performance, but Elixirs ability to handle a large amount of requests concurrently means that it'll have better throughput.

For example, if a web request in framework A takes 100ms and framework B takes 200ms, but framework B can handle 4,000 requests concurrently and framework A can handle 1,000 requests concurrently, then framework B will beat framework A in handling 20,000 requests.

framework A - (20,000r / 1,000r) * 100ms = 2,000ms

framework B - (20,000r / 4,000r) * 200ms = 1,000ms

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