tadasajon
What is the best BEAM server?
I’ve just read this article, which is of the opinion that there are some very powerful multi-core machines available these days: Use One Big Server | Speculative Branches
This server has 128 cores with 256 simultaneous threads. With all of the cores working together, this server is capable of 4 TFLOPs of peak double precision computing performance…above and below each CPU is the memory: 16 slots of DDR4-3200 RAM per socket. The largest capacity “cost effective” DIMMs today are 64 GB. Populated cost-efficiently, this server can hold 1 TB of memory. Populated with specialized high-capacity DIMMs (which are generally slower than the smaller DIMMs), this server supports up to 8 TB of memory total. At DDR4-3200, with a total of 16 memory channels, this server will likely see ~200 Gbps of memory throughput across all of its cores.
In terms of I/O, each CPU offers 64 PCIe gen 4 lanes. With 128 PCIe lanes total, this server is capable of supporting 30 NVMe SSDs plus a network card. Typical configurations you can buy will offer slots for around 16 SSDs or disks… and this server is equipped with a 50-100 Gbps network connection.
So my question is: would this machine be ideal absolutely ideal for running a massive, high-traffic Elixir app?
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AstonJ
I’m not so sure Oliver 
Even just with dedicated servers the difference between 1 large vs 2 smaller, or 2 large vs 3 or 4 smaller could be big enough to consider smaller (and again if you have a whole datacenter full of them).
But what’s more performant could influence the decision if the difference is more than just slight… so if anyone does do such tests, I for one would be interested in hearing your findings 
I wonder if @OvermindDL1 did any further experiments on that set-up^^?
AstonJ
I was surprised to learn that WhatsApp dropped beefy machines and now run on servers capped at 32GB of RAM:
They also no longer run FreeBSD:
It wasn’t for performance tho, so I’d be interested in hearing more about optimal server hardware and OS combos as well (tho from what WhatsApp have done, it’s probably safe to say you don’t ‘need’ beefy machines to run very high traffic services :D)
Exadra37
But the main reason they did so was to fit in the Facebook DevOps model, not because was best. In fact to make it work they end-up to make a lot of contributions to the Erlang core and they still have some hacks that weren’t accepted into the core.
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