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Comment by nathan_long | Hacker News Reader

Another example: I work on a Rails app where the user submits a request to us, and we have to talk to an API to respond. We can't afford to leave the connection open with the user, so we make them poll for results.

My understanding is that the cheap processes of Elixir would mean we could just keep a connection open to that user if we wanted to. Similarly, no need for a background processing framework like ActiveJob; just use processes.

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That's right. Because Elixir is 10x faster than Rails, we don't need to worry about caching so much. And because it supports cheap concurrency, we don't need to offload long running tasks to a background task. So the overall structure is simpler.

And this works across the whole architecture. One of our projects right now is a mobile medical application for medical where caregivers communicate in real time with a number of patients. We have the mobile app talking to the server using a REST API and real time messaging for chat. The caregivers can communicate with the server using a web application with integrated web chat or via an XMPP client. And we have the normal public web and admin CRUD. All via a single server process in a single language. This is what Elixir/Phoenix was made for, it enables a new generation of modern apps.

What webserver are you using? Running puma in threaded mode, even on MRI, should allow your external API calls to run in parallel - this might simplify things a bit :)

Maybe so, but the fact that Rails includes Active Job shows that this is a common problem.

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