Comparing Erlang-based web technologies with the emerging MEAN stack for scalable web applications

Abstract

Online services such as social networks, e-commerce sites and multiplayer games experience heavy user traffic on a daily basis and users expect instant response times irrespective of the number of concurrent users being served. To meet such expectations, web applications should be able to scale and perform well under heavy loads. The selection of underlying technologies is of paramount importance, based on a good understanding of expected usage scenarios and transaction types. This study acknowledges the fact that the emerging JavaScript-based MEAN stack (MongoDB, Express, AngularJS, Node.js) is portrayed as the natural choice for building scalable web applications. Despite this, Erlang – a programming language developed in 1986 – was specifically designed to handle massive concurrency and has been shown to withstand heavy loads in the telecommunications domain. This study proposes an Erlang-based alternative to the MEAN stack. The resulting stack is compared with the MEAN stack through a series of lab-based experiments to quantify the benefits of using one stack over another in specific scenarios. Tests assess different types of transactions, including (1) HTTP requests for static content, (2) HTTP requests with database reads/writes and (3) bi-directional communication via the WebSocket protocols. Different measurements are considered in the evaluation process, including resource consumption, response times and the actual throughput handled. The results obtained provide indications of how each stack scales and performs in specific scenarios with respect to the different measures being considered.