Newxan
Background
Like many others we’re currently using Alpine images for our deployments. Specifically at the moment we rely on:
hexpm/elixir:1.15.4-erlang-26.0.2-alpine-3.17.4.
When looking around for a current unrelated issue i stumbled upon this issue Overrun stack and heap OTP-26.0 · Issue #7292 · erlang/otp · GitHub
which had this comment
https://github.com/erlang/otp/issues/7292#issuecomment-1569825141
This made me curious, and I didn’t want to pollute the issue with unrelated comments so I thought I would ask my question here instead.
Looking around in the forum and other places I can’t find any information stating that performance would be different depending on if your system is using GNU libc or musl and since Alpine images are very popular and by default rely on musl I felt it warranted a post.
Question
Is there any performance difference if I use a images such as Alpine that rely on musl rather than for example a Ubuntu image with libc for production deployments? and is any such difference jit related?
Thank you in advance.
Where Next?
Trending in Questions
Other Trending Topics
Latest on Elixir Forum
Sponsor Spotlight
Build Elixir applications with speed and confidence.
Categories:
Sub Categories:
Forums
Popular Tags
- #ecto
- #liveview
- #troubleshooting
- #learning-elixir
- #deployment
- #library
- #erlang
- #testing
- #genserver
- #mix
- #absinthe
- #remote-other
- #otp
- #plug
- #how-to-question
- #macros
- #postgres
- #elixirconf
- #channels
- #exunit
- #discussion
- #code-sync
- #javascript
- #podcasts
- #onsite
- #dialyzer
- #docker
- #authentication
- #umbrella
- #full-time-contract
- #podcasts-by-brainlid
- #ecto-query
- #blog-post
- #elixir-ls
- #ai
- #elixirconf-us
- #phoenix_html
- #iex
- #graphql
- #genstage
- #websockets
- #supervisor
- #advent-of-code
- #distillery
- #processes
- #api
- #forms
- #hex
- #security
- #metaprogramming
Our Sponsors
Build Elixir applications with speed and confidence.
Supporting innovation across the BEAM ecosystem.
We build reliable cloud platforms for business-critical systems.
Catch errors, track performance, monitor hosts and more.
Elixir, Erlang & BEAM conferences from Code Sync - join us in 2026!
Practical resources that improve the lives of professional developers.
Bringing learning, work and compliance together since 1987.
The deployment platform built for Elixir: PaaS ease, VPS control.
The team behind Membrane, Popcorn, LiveDebugger. Available for hire.
Courses that'll move you from confusion to "Aha, now I get it!"
Showing Posts 1 to 6- Show Best Posts
- Show All (oldest first)
- Show All (newest first)
jhogberg
Yes, there’s a significant loss in performance with
musl. I made a PR for OTP 27 that will remove these differences, the comment describes things in a bit more detail:https://github.com/erlang/otp/pull/7174
Newxan
Thanks for the insight!
Moosieus
Do you have a ballpark estimate of what the performance difference would be prior to OTP 27?
tj0
Super interesting. I thought the performance difference would be due to the default allocator in musl being slower. I know Android uses different defaults to improve performance.
Also interested if there is any performance difference with OTP 27.
Super excited for the new json module being included by default.
jhogberg
~10-15% in sequential code.
altdsoy
Wow!
I wanted to check for the
jsonmodule doc.. But it was broken on the RC2 news page..but I suspected that it might be a newer news update, indeed here is the RC3 release page: Erlang/OTP 27.0 Release Candidate 3 - Erlang/OTP
But hey!!
Look at the doc for the json module: json — stdlib v6.0
Looks familiar right?!
I’m not an erlang developer but from time to time I was looking at the Erlang Docs and I can’t express enough how excited I am for this doc update! Kudos to the Erlang/Elixir folks!