On Oct 15, 2007, at 1:34 PM, Dave Rafkind wrote:
I am interested in using a newly popular and hyped-up language called Erlang (www.erlang.org) to write a general-purpose distributed tracking backend, but I'm running into some difficulty finding a good feature set and performance profile to compare and benchmark against, since (as you mentioned) most systems are proprietary and don't release system specs :(
Most real-world tracking systems of the fleet and logistics kind scale reasonably well on off-the-shelf platforms since they are not real-time in any significant sense. The logistics field has a number of companies that are the equivalent of "quants" in finance that squeeze optimizations out of this data without actually owning any real logistics assets; a tiny improvement in efficiency can mean tens of millions of dollars of profit. The entire tool chain for tracking is pretty competitive.
On the other hand, some real-time tracking problems like battlespace management and intelligence analytics do not scale as well as people would like due in large part to traditional spatial data structures scaling poorly at high update rates. This can be mitigated to some extent if you limit the problem to dimensionless data (i.e. points).
With some specs on update rate, size of data set, geometry types, geometry distributions, etc it should be possible to come up with rough-order-of-magnitude estimates for benchmarks. Spatial data systems that are really "big" in some dimension tend to run up against the limitations of the data structures, which does make them somewhat predictable on a given piece of hardware. Like with many things, the algorithm selection will tell you more about the scaling behavior than the miscellaneous other optimizations and bits of special sauce that may squeeze another 20-30% out of it.
Coincidentally, I have studied using Erlang in tracking back-ends as well (and am still considering it for that purpose). It does not solve any existing problems, but it seems well-suited to that particular task. It would be an interesting project for Erlang, but I do not know that it would generate a benefit an end-user would notice.
Cheers, J. Andrew Rogers _______________________________________________ Geowanking mailing list [email protected] http://lists.burri.to/mailman/listinfo/geowanking
