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Re:Facebook Chat Architecture (Erlang) by WALoeIII on Monday December 13, 2010 @01:08PM (#2001375)
"Pass it over to some other thread"

What you are suggesting here is exactly what Erlang provides for you. Each connection is a light-weight process inside the VM. The VM then schedules these Erlang processes against native threads. The difference is Erlang has perfected and proven that it can do this reliably over 20 years of development. You would be implementing this by hand, and guaranteed to screw up because its a very hard problem and you are not the smartest person in the world.

Hybrid solutions with Evented I/O and Multi-threading end up being the solution, Erlang is a hybrid out of the box.

Re:Facebook Chat Architecture (Erlang) by axod on Monday December 13, 2010 @02:21PM (#2001634)
I have implemented it. It works well. You don't have to be the smartest person in the world to not screw up elementary programming problems. Mibbit handles a few million users without issue on a few VPSes.

Erlang "doing it for me" isn't going to be anywhere near as efficient as me doing it myself.

I'm probably not the smartest person in the world, but I'm certainly smart enough to write a comet/web server that's fast enough.

I guess I'm not going to convince anyone here shrug. If you believe Erlang is a magic bullet great for you.

Re:Facebook Chat Architecture (Erlang) by lzimm on Tuesday December 14, 2010 @01:27AM (#2003335)
Totally agree. Since when did a work queue/thread pool thing become anything beyond intro to systems work?

Furthermore, I don't know where everyone gets off saying erlang is so fast either: I'm not sure where things are now, but last time I checked, their scheduling algorithms were leaving quite a lot on the table, standing to benefit quite substantially from even the most basic operations and logistics knowledge.