How Elixir Helped Us Scale Our Video User Profile Service for the Olympics

Nice, that's tangible direct money-in-the-pocket results you can take an owner and make a case for a technology. Can talk about functional features, or advantage of actor based paradigm for concurrency but something tangible like that is hard to beat. They might answer with something like "I don't know anything about beams and elixirs but this looks good for the bottom line, let's adopt that".

Just a standard case for using fast compiled languages (Java/C#/Erlang/Scala...) vs slow interpreted mono-core languages (python/ruby/php...).

Python and Erlang shop here. Last time I was performance testing some python applications.

2-3 ms for decoding the request (gunicorn internals) + 0.5 for flask + 0.3 ms for newrelic + 0.2 ms for sentry + 0.5 ms spent in the application code (a simple return "hello").

That's a total of 2-5 ms of power and time wasted, not running the application code and creating latency for all calls.

Add that the webserver has to fork to X processes to handle requests in parallel because each request is blocking by design (cf. "global interpreter lock" and common webservers internal).

When the ecosystem (webservers/interpreter/languages) is slow & ineffective (i.e. ruby/python/php). So will be all the applications written on it.

It's trivial to double the performance and half the hardware by switching to a better ecosystem.