Bandit server for Phoenix is next level, check it out!

I’m already using it in production. It works. The performance is about the same in my use case.

On the plus side, Bandit is built on top of OTP primitives and doesn’t do the annoying silent crashes that Cowboy does.

On the downside, it’s still fairly young, and there are rough edges. Pre-9 version had some breaking bugs, the current (pre-10) version seems okay but some behaviors differ from Cowboy like the lack of interrupting requests when client drops off. We also observed increased memory usage, but these things can be related to one another.

Generally, it looks like it’s the future, and at some point should probably be the default over Cowboy, but you should use it with caution on production (I’m hovering my hand over the switch back to Cowboy just in case for now).

This is the insight I was looking for, thank you.

I’m sticking with Bandit, because I like where its going, and It’s necessary for others to adopt it, so that we can detect those cases where failure happens, and library will improve because of that.

I see only 5 issues on that repo as of now.

I’m here if anyone has any specific blocking issues for adoption at your shops!

The current APM for e.g new relic don’t work with Bandit. This takes away visibility for the apps as there is no telemetry. Any plans to make the telemetry compatible to cowboy so it can be used without losing metrics

The groundwork has been laid, but I do not personally have any plans for such a library (mostly time limitations and the fact that there’s still a lot to do on the core of Bandit).

Bandit provides a rich telemetry interface today (as does Thousand Island). There’s enough there for someone to build everything that’s needed.

Making it “compatible with cowboy” would mean literally emitting events tagged with the :cowboy atom from bandit (and making sure all the metadata was a superset of cowboy’s). The place for bandit support to be added is in the New Relic agent.

On average, I have noticed a 2x - 3x boost in performance with Bandit over Cowboy and it works great with Nginx.

Hi..

When you say it works great with Nginx.. What’s the role of Nginx in your case?

I’m curious since it’s both servers, right?

Are you using Nginx as a reverse proxy or maybe for serving static assets only and letting Bandit for the “application” server?

Do you mind sharing some details on your infra?

Thanks!

@hubertlepicki and others; 1.3.0 just went out with a fix for the long-standing issue of increasing memory use (which wasn’t really a memory issue so much as it was an issue with how memory use is reported, but anyway), along with a few other fixes. See CHANGELOG as always. Hopefully this fixes your issue; please report back if so as I’d love to have more evidence that we’ve finally licked this.

Yes, I’m using Nginx as a reverse proxy, caching, serving static files, TLS/SSL termination, and a proxy for gRPC connections.