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Comment by rdtsc | Hacker News Reader

Another set of benchmarks that shows Erlang's cowboy coming ahead on EC instances. It also compares EC2 vs real hardware and throws more contenders in the mix.

On physical hardware the race is pretty close (except node, python-gevent, but cluster node did very well).

http://eric.themoritzfamily.com/websocket-demo-results-v2.ht...

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Yeah, because of cowboy and Erlang's design it is going to out perform a single process evented server hands-down.

  1. The evented servers are bound to one CPU, Erlang will use all CPUs 
  2. any bit of blocking code will stall the other code, even it just for a moment.

It is a little unfair to compare the two approaches.

I am not sure it will always under-perform with one CPU. It depends if async threads are used and if kernel poll is enabled. Erlang is designed for better low latency response at the expense of _some_ sequential slow down. I wonder if Erlang would scale slower but it will throw less errors as number of requests increases.

EDIT:

Also it would seem benchmarking Erlang and forcing it to run on a single core just like node.js is deliberately handicapping it. One of the strengths of Erlang is exactly the ability to take advantage of multiple cores.

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