I am completely unfamiliar with Elixir but I love the aesthetics of the language. That's a really neat piece of work, thank you for sharing.

I often wonder what are some good usecases for Elixir? What kind of problem do you solve using Elixir?

It runs on BEAM, the erlang vm, and has essentially the same usecases as erlang. Good for distributed systems, including web applications, bad for cpu bound tasks, for systems programming. Not great for scripting but usable if you want.

> bad for cpu bound tasks

Just to elaborate on this: Elixir is slower at CPU work than C/C++/Java but still significantly faster than Ruby/Python/etc. not to mention a lot easier to do work in parallel due to SMP and the BEAM's concurrency model.

Plus, if you have a big task it's a whole lot easier to add CPUs to do additional work in Elixir/Erlang than in any of those languages-- C/C++/Java/Ruby/Python/etc.

If your work requires more than one node, Elixir is a lot faster than trying to create distributed system in another language-- you can just spread the work over many machines almost trivially by comparison.

Literally just tell other nodes to run the function.

I hear about the distributed properties of the vm often, but every example seems naive in that the work is passed to a named node, where in practice it seems the need would be to load balance between nodes available nodes.

For example, I have a system in Go that uses redis to pull jobs, each process I spin up uses a buffered channel allowing 20 concurrent requests. I looked at elixir because I liked having a the process isolation and the dynamic nature of the language (the jobs scrape data from the interwebs), but I couldn't find a simple way to distribute jobs to nodes unsuring each node is capped at 20 concurrent jobs.

A simple way to do that in Elixir / Erlang is to just have each node spawn 20 processes that fetch work from redis (or a central coordinating process on another node)

Yeah, so the details of such is what I have not seen any examples of. I do plan to figure it out soon and then hopefully share it to benefit others. From what I understand thus far, I'll create a GenServer to connect to redis (so only using a single redis connection), pull jobs from redis and spawn Tasks on all nodes registered with the GenServer. And then I need to figure out how to limit the GenServer to a single instance per app on all nodes, or if too much hassle, just allow a GenServer per node and only spawn Tasks on the local node (so 1 redis connection per node).

If you go with one GenServer per node, then that one just connects to redis and just pulls jobs (using BLPOP or whatever). When it has gotten a job it checks out a worker from poolboy and assigns it that work.

You could also just have every single worker process go directly to redis and have it pull jobs in a loop. But where's the fun in that ;)

If you want a single global coordinator instead of one per node you can use :global [2] to globally register a process in the cluster. This process is then cluster-wide reachable under its registered name. It can talk to each of your worker pools in the cluster and round-robin try to check out workers and assign them work. And if you do this you might as well ask yourself if you really need redis instead of keeping it all within your Elixir system.

Deciding on which node this process lives is still up to you, but there are libraries like locks [3] that allow you to automatically determine a leader in your cluster.

And once this is done you can start dealing with overload :)

Of course this is just a simple and naive approach, there are a lot of really useful Erlang libraries to check out. Here's a list of libs that helped me when getting started by reading their docs and sources in no particular order:

https://github.com/heroku/canal_lock - Erlang lock manager for concurrently variable resource numbers

https://github.com/jlouis/safetyvalve - queueing facilities for tasks to be executed so their concurrency and rate can be limited on a running system

https://github.com/fishcakez/sbroker - process broker for matchmaking between two groups of processes using sojourn time based active queue management to prevent congestion.

https://github.com/ferd/backoff - exponential backoffs and timers to be used within OTP processes when dealing with cyclical events, such as reconnections, or generally retrying things

https://github.com/jlouis/fuse - A Circuit Breaker for Erlang

https://github.com/basho/sidejob - Parallel worker and capacity limiting library for Erlang

https://github.com/pspdfkit-labs/sidetask - My humble Elixir wrapper for basho's sidejob

[1] https://github.com/devinus/poolboy also used in Ecto, look through the Ecto sources if you want to see how it's used in Elixir.

[2] http://erlang.org/doc/man/global.html

[3] https://github.com/uwiger/locks and then https://github.com/uwiger/locks/blob/master/doc/locks_leader...