[Chicago] Smackdown project

[Garrett Smith]

You can get the source code for the two servers here:

https://github.com/gar1t/pyerl-concurrency-smackdown

The presentation content is there as well, but you need to build it
first with Sphinx. Install Sphinx (e.g. generally python-sphinx
package in Linux distros) and run "make html" from the project doc
directory. You can then view the presentation by opening
doc/_build/html/index.html in a browser.

We ran out of time last night, but I had one more really crazy round
for these warriors: 20K concurrent connections with 10 second work
delays! Seriously, totally insane!

You can see the results under Round 4 here:

https://github.com/gar1t/pyerl-concurrency-smackdown/blob/master/results/chipy-2011-09-08.org

I'd encourage people to play around with these tests if you're
interested. You can run them on your laptop with some tweaks to your
environment. If you run into problems, post here and I can try to
help.

I agree wholeheartedly with Dan's point that a "sleep" operation is a
pretty light weight test, though the point was to strictly measure
"concurrency" support. An interesting tweak would be to do some real
work (e.g. calc a short Fibonacci value, write to a file, etc.) That
sort of experiment would show that these super high concurrency
scenarios are absurd in light of actual bottlenecks like CPU and disk
iops. But at lower concurrency levels, you might start to see some
real differences between Python and Erlang.

Anyway, long live Python threads! Long live Erlang processes!

Garrett