Efficiency Guide
User's Guide
Version 6.4

Chapters

• Introduction
  • Top of chapter
  • Purpose
  • Prerequisites
• The Eight Myths of Erlang Performance
  • Top of chapter
  • Myth: Funs are slow
  • Myth: List comprehensions are slow
  • Myth: Tail-recursive functions are MUCH faster than recursive functions
  • Myth: '++' is always bad
  • Myth: Strings are slow
  • Myth: Repairing a Dets file is very slow
  • Myth: BEAM is a stack-based byte-code virtual machine (and therefore slow)
  • Myth: Use '_' to speed up your program when a variable is not used
• Common Caveats
  • Top of chapter
  • The timer module
  • list_to_atom/1
  • length/1
  • setelement/3
  • size/1
  • split_binary/2
  • The '--' operator
• Constructing and matching binaries
  • Top of chapter
  • How binaries are implemented
  • Constructing binaries
  • Matching binaries
• List handling
  • Top of chapter
  • Creating a list
  • List comprehensions
  • Deep and flat lists
  • Why you should not worry about recursive lists functions
• Functions
  • Top of chapter
  • Pattern matching
  • Function Calls
  • Memory usage in recursion
• Tables and databases
  • Top of chapter
  • Ets, Dets and Mnesia
  • Ets specific
  • Mnesia specific
• Processes
  • Top of chapter
  • Creation of an Erlang process
  • Process messages
  • The SMP emulator
• Drivers
  • Top of chapter
  • Drivers and concurrency
  • Avoiding copying of binaries when calling a driver
  • Returning small binaries from a driver
  • Returning big binaries without copying from a driver
• Advanced
  • Top of chapter
  • Memory
  • System limits
• Profiling
  • Top of chapter
  • Do not guess about performance - profile
  • Big systems
  • What to look for
  • Tools
  • Benchmarking