Interesting picture: Benchmarking Erlang versus Java concurrency

Interesting. Suppose you could post another one that goes to, say, 100,000 “tasks”?

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I think you may be right about Scala not ever being accepted as an Enterprise language.

Scala can perform type inference, but it doesn’t have to - you can always explicitly state the type. Also, Scala is statically typed. So, while you may elect to let Scala perform type inference, it doesn’t open the program to the potential liabilities of dynamically typed languages like Ruby, Perl or Python.

(I’m the author of the Kilim framework).

Ken asked about 100000 tasks. How about a million? Download and try it out.

http://kilim.malhar.net

This particular benchmark is about testing the speed of message passing. 3000 tasks == 9 million messages (each node passes a message to every other, and waits for a return message).

There’s another benchmark that measures task churn speeds (speed of creation and destruction). At the moment, Kilim’s faster than Erlang and Haskell.

–sriram.

@stephan,

No, I’m not planning to have any abstractions on top of it. I don’t want to fall into the standard java trap of creating yet another massive framework. I’d like all the essential API to fit within a few pages of text.

I’d prefer to cover most techniques as examples and pull it in as part of the framework only when some pattern catches on.

Also, when time permits, I’ll put in a few more examples to cover nio, standard eventing stuff etc. There’s a jetty example that works easily enought with Jetty’s continuations and I have rewritten the tjws webserver in terms of Kilim threads, but both need cleaning up to show as example code.

Um, those who don’t use Swing don’t use it because the font rendering is still too often lousy, because it’s hard to integrate with native widgets, and because it lacks too many useful widgets. I agree with Sriram’s opinion on the value of core functionality. Other people can make frameworks as they see fit. (I think a new Java web framework is invented just about every week.)

> “and it’s interesting to compare to Erlang”

When can a single micro benchmark taken out of context without corresponding source code and compiler options ever be considered “interesting”?

It is however quite interesting to note that concurrency oriented programming seems to gain in popularity.

@Stephan: I am interested in knowledge, that is actually my whole point.

For me a random graph without context is not very interesting at all. Usually it smells more like marketing than engineering. I could probably produce a graph showing that Ruby is faster than Java for a specific area if I wanted. It would be against conventional wisdom, yet it would not really be interesting unless I told you what it is I am actually comparing.

In other words *the framework* may be interesting depending on what happens in the Java world (I am hoping we will see the actor model used more widely!) but the single graph in itself without context isn’t.

Before I would consider it interesting I would like to know if this micro benchmark corresponds to a relevant use case in the real world. What is the message sending pattern? How many messages are sent between the “tasks”? What is the message size? What type of data is being sent? Do the tasks do anything but pass messages to each other? Is the data immutable? How do they pass messages? Is the message sending order guaranteed? Is it single core or multi core (or perhaps even tasks on different processors)? Is the benchmarking code concise and readable and following the recommended coding style? What is actually being measured and compared in the graph? Zero-copy vs copying? Byte code vs natively compiled code?