estimate performance of an Erlang system?

Mike Williams, one of Erlang's original developers, is fond of saying "If you don't run experiments before you start designing a new system, your entire system will be an experiment!" This philosophy is widespread around Erlang projects, in part because the Erlang development environment encourages development by prototyping. Such prototyping will also allow sensible performance estimates to be made. For those of you who want to leverage experience with C and C++, some rough rules of thumb are: • Code which involves mainly number crunching and data processing will run about 10 times slower than an equivalent C program. This includes almost all "micro benchmarks" • Large systems which spent most of their time communicating with other systems, recovering from faults and making complex decisions run at least as fast as equivalent C programs. Like in any other language or system, experienced developers develop a sense of which operations are expensive and which are cheap. Erlang ...  more