What makes a web application fast?

[AstonJ]

@joeerl

Often you don’t need a database for example you might like to have a system where you store all the user data as in the file system with “one file per user” this will scale very nicely - just move the files to a new machine if you need more capacity.

Erlang has two primitives term_to_binary and the inverse binary_to_term that serialise any term and reconstruct it - so storing complex terms on disk is really easy.

I have mixed feelings about databases, they are great for aggregate operations (for example, find all users that have these attributes) but terrible for operations on individual users (where a single file per user is far better).

This is all very fascinating to me! I’ve always thought that using the file system was bad for this kind of thing, but I’m finding a lot of things I learned for another language simply go out of the window when it comes to BEAM languages

Joe, I’m not sure how much Elixir you are doing, but I’d LOVE to see a course from you like the one from PragDave. Better still, I’d love for you and @rvirding to do it together (where’s Mike these days? I reckon a reunion is called for )