Solid Queue 1.6.0 now supports fiber workers

>BEAM/Elixir compared to Rails

Compared to Ruby. Elixir land doesn't have something similar to Rails, and phoenix is not it.

I’m really curious about this as someone that has never tried Elixir/BEAM.

What could I stop caring about?

To dig a bit into why fibers are more efficient than threads.

The OS has a rather opaque view on what happens in a thread. It doesn't know how the memory is used or what memory is efficient. The OS can block a thread when it runs into IO, but it doesn't know or care about what other threads in an application it can or should activate.

Fibers bring the threading into the application layer. While the application can't choose which and when a thread runs, it can make choices about which fibers to run. Further, the application knows intimate details about things like the stack of a given thread. When it goes to park a fiber, it knows just how much memory should be saved off so the fiber can resume and it doesn't have to save off all the memory allocated to a thread's stack. Further, because so many programs are stack based an application can pretty smartly save and reuse segments of the stack which are common amongst fibers. So, for example, if you spin off 1000 fibers at one location in code, the stack for those 1000 fibers will be identical right up until the fiber starts executing.

The main drawback of fibers is they can't implement things like fair scheduling. Applications have few ways to park a currently running fiber to let another one run if, for example, the app wants to make some progress on all the fibers alive. The app has to wait for the fiber to hit some sort of IO point in the code or insert explicit park checks (The JVM actually does this for GC purposes. It creates "safepoints" which application threads make a quick check to see if the JVM wants to start a GC). The OS has more power here, it can simply interrupt the thread and start running something else for a given quanta.

I'm unclear on the relevance of a comparison between Go and Ruby here. Ruby is radically slower than Go. It's down there with Python, if not a touch behind [1]. From the outside, I'd expect that it's possible that slight improvements in the context switching time will be dwarfed by the generally slow execution of Ruby itself; that is, if Ruby is going to take 100 microseconds to do something, whether it context switches in 1 microsecond (best-case OS thread cost) or .2 microseconds (best-case goroutine switch) is of somewhat less consequence then it is for a compiled langauge that can complete that task in 2 microseconds. That ratio of 50x is not just something I made up, it's about what you can expect in general. I'd need to see the actual Ruby benchmarks to come to any conclusions as to whether or not I'm right.

The other problem with this sort of benchmark, which is a mistake I also commonly see made by Node developers, is that the Ruby HTTP stack has significant native code in it, like: https://github.com/puma/puma/tree/main/ext/puma_http11 This is a good and proper thing that brings benefits to all involved; it's not like it's "cheating" or anything, it's a real performance benefit. But it does mean when you're benchmarking a simple HTTP server, you're benchmarking Ruby qua Ruby a lot less than you think you are, and so the relevance of such benchmarks to codebases that have actual Ruby in them will be less.

[1]: https://programming-language-benchmarks.vercel.app/python-vs...

That ruby fiber vs go goroutine benchmark is interesting. The 4-10x memory use doesn't surprise me, but the near performance does. I'm guessing there is more of a gap with the p50.

How much load? How many concurrent connections? What machine? Don’t get me wrong, benchmarks like these are useful to help ballpark performance floors, but really only relevant for a given load scenario. They don’t mean a lot without context. Not an attack by the way, just feedback.

Some context:

Fiber is a datastructure where the execution context is saved. Eg. registers (including instruction pointer) and stack etc. That is a fiber: data.

You normally use a threadpool, core pinned, to execute these fibers.

Since you jump in userspace, you more or less only have to pay for cache misses.

There are many upsides of designing a program using fibers. The major downside i see is that you can not blindly trust mutex and semaphores any longer - since the fiber can change execution thread while yielding/waiting for condition.

Pretty sure that is entirely an unfair comparison. You don't need a connection per thread either. It is common to have web servers handles thousands of requests per second with a connection pool size of 20. As long as the handler threads borrow a connection for only a little time and block waiting for a connection while other threads are doing their thing, it works out fine.

There is absolutely no logical reason why database pool sizing could be a reason for preferring fibers over threads.

I think by default they check out a new connection when obtained a job and then release it. In comparison with some async languages like JS where a connection is only checked when a query is about to be executed