Comments on: RESTful Services with Erlang and Yaws http://steve.vinoski.net/blog/2008/03/31/restful-services-with-erlang-and-yaws/ Ask forgiveness, not permission. Sat, 19 May 2012 14:32:40 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.1 By: steve http://steve.vinoski.net/blog/2008/03/31/restful-services-with-erlang-and-yaws/comment-page-1/#comment-798 steve Wed, 02 Apr 2008 12:04:13 +0000 http://steve.vinoski.net/blog/2008/03/31/restful-services-with-erlang-and-yaws/#comment-798 Darach: yes, fully agreed. That’s why my article mentions the “Apache vs. Yaws” graphs more as a curiosity than anything else. It would be nice if there were a more rigorous and complete set of tests, better documented as well, that showed the strengths and weaknesses of each web server in more detail.

]]> By: Darach http://steve.vinoski.net/blog/2008/03/31/restful-services-with-erlang-and-yaws/comment-page-1/#comment-797 Darach Wed, 02 Apr 2008 11:56:34 +0000 http://steve.vinoski.net/blog/2008/03/31/restful-services-with-erlang-and-yaws/#comment-797 I might have to do just that Steve! In my case, I suspect Yaws will be lighter-weight than apache for my application. Of course, I never leave a suspicion/hunch unmeasured! :)

The Apache vs Yaws results are impressive and show Erlang/Yaws to be resilient under very hostile conditions. But IMHO, the results are incomplete. The practical utility of this impressive scalability/resilience is latency limited. From my quick measurements: 800KB/s with 80K sessions is 10 bytes per second per session. So, latency degrades considerably as load increases and is the limiting factor w.r.t utility here.

This blog entry (~20KB now) would take 30 minutes to display under these conditions.

The benchmark results would be much more widely acceptable and quotable if this and other practical limitations were documented. As it stands they can easily be misinterpreted.

]]> By: steve http://steve.vinoski.net/blog/2008/03/31/restful-services-with-erlang-and-yaws/comment-page-1/#comment-796 steve Wed, 02 Apr 2008 04:11:52 +0000 http://steve.vinoski.net/blog/2008/03/31/restful-services-with-erlang-and-yaws/#comment-796 Darach: thanks. As for memory, CPU, etc., since the article instructs you on how to build such services, why not build some and measure for yourself? ;-)

In all seriousness, what you’re asking about really depends on what you’re building. Getting the details you’re asking about would require building the services multiple ways, presumably in different languages with different frameworks, to be able to compare everything, and I don’t have time to do that. I did some benchmarking awhile back based on the particulars of my application that proved this is the best direction for me, but YMMV.

]]> By: Darach http://steve.vinoski.net/blog/2008/03/31/restful-services-with-erlang-and-yaws/comment-page-1/#comment-794 Darach Tue, 01 Apr 2008 19:16:43 +0000 http://steve.vinoski.net/blog/2008/03/31/restful-services-with-erlang-and-yaws/#comment-794 Sweet article Steve. But how does the memory footprint, CPU utilization, and so on compare to, say, RESTful services deployed on other RESTful stacks? It would be interesting to see this benchmark reproduced and compared with other environments deployed on the same infrastructure.

]]> By: steve http://steve.vinoski.net/blog/2008/03/31/restful-services-with-erlang-and-yaws/comment-page-1/#comment-793 steve Tue, 01 Apr 2008 14:25:44 +0000 http://steve.vinoski.net/blog/2008/03/31/restful-services-with-erlang-and-yaws/#comment-793 James: thanks.

Regarding Sam Ruby’s Etags comment, the issue, as always, comes down to article detail and length. It just can’t cover everything. For example, I didn’t cover handling POST data, either. Rather than publishing a new article for such things, I’ll probably just follow up here on my blog.

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