My OTP 21 Highlights

172 points by mischov 8 years ago | 18 comments

fasteo 8 years ago |

>>>> While working on the BEAMJIT development I’ve been looking a lot at the luajit project and what Mike Pall has done both in the JIT but also in the interpreter. Inspired by this and some other ideas that we got from the BEAMJIT project we decided it was time to do a major overhaul of the way that the BEAM interpreter is created

As a long time Openresty (luajit) user, I have always feel a deep admiration for Mike Pall's work. After reading this, more so.

rdtsc 8 years ago |

7.5% speed gain from BEAMJIT. 2.8x faster file ops because of dirty nifs support. Multiple poll sets. This is good stuff, I can't wait to benchmark it and play with it!

delta1 8 years ago | |

I was unsure what nifs referred to, is it Native Implemented Functions? [0]

[0] http://erlang.org/doc/tutorial/nif.html

Ndymium 8 years ago | | |

Yes. The problem earlier was that NIFs had a maximum runtime of 1 millisecond before they needed to store their work and return control to BEAM, to avoid blocking the BEAM schedulers. Dirty NIFs refer to NIFs that can run for longer, on special dirty schedulers, without affecting the stability of the BEAM system.

ghayes 8 years ago |

It's great to see the team continuing to work toward better performance. Each improvement can help every application built on BEAM.

alberth 8 years ago |

So is JIT coming to OTP 21 or not?

Because reading that post it’s confusing if they are releasing a JIT or simply making BEAM runtime improvements.

I ask because a JIT was scheduled for OTP 21 as noted here https://mobile.twitter.com/FrancescoC/status/872736686006046...

mischov 8 years ago | |

I think it's part of the "and beyond" in that picture, and not coming in OTP 21.

This video also supports that guess: https://youtu.be/hHhm0bfdj-4?t=10m14s

dnautics 8 years ago |

> Also it is now possible to open device files using file:open

Anyone want to write a high-performance, highly distributed object store in a BEAM language?

macintux 8 years ago | |

Based on my time at Basho observing and assisting with the development of Riak[1], I don't think you'll get the performance you want from built-in I/O, even with the new dirty scheduler support.

We (well, primarily Matthew Von-Maszewski) spent countless hours optimizing LevelDB as the most performant backend for most use cases.

You'd be much better off building atop Riak than starting your own object store from scratch.

[1]: Most active Riak development today is courtesy the NHS - https://github.com/nhs-riak/riak

macintux 8 years ago | | |

Having said that, Martin Sumner with the NHS created a Leveldb replacement in Erlang with some impressive performance characteristics before the latest BEAM I/O enhancements.

https://github.com/martinsumner/leveled

skrebbel 8 years ago | | |

Ha! I wonder whether all them Brexiteers knew that they weren't just saving the NHS but also Riak!

macintux 8 years ago | | |

Correction: Basho's repository is still canonical. https://github.com/basho/riak/

dnautics 8 years ago | | |

I doubt for most distributed object stores (with consistency or availability guarantees), performance is bottlenecked by the underlying filesystem access. Probably, network latency runs the show.

lliamander 8 years ago | |

Maybe something based on this paper: https://blog.acolyer.org/2018/03/27/anna-a-kvs-for-any-scale... ?

Immortalin 8 years ago | |

CouchDB?

dnautics 8 years ago | | |

binaries, not structured objects. Redundancy via erasure coding, etc.

misterbowfinger 8 years ago | |

i got u