jaeyson

jaeyson

When to use async and sync code in Elixir?

Sorry for the very vague noob question, I really want to ask this:

When do we use async or sync code in the context of Elixir? AFAIK genserver call is synchronous which is blocking code. Do you have a real example or when do you decide which one to use? I’ve read these article When should I use asynchronous code in JavaScript? – Nico Zerpa, Your JavaScript Friend, but I haven’t found a good example when it is better to use sync over async and vice versa. Any help/enlightenment is greatly appreciated :pray:.

Most Liked

Maartz

Maartz

Hey! That’s a very good question.
I’ve found this post from elixirforum very interesting.

If it doesn’t answer your question, it should give you some clues to decide whether when you should use sync or async.
Hope it will help.

dewetblomerus

dewetblomerus

Great question @jaeyson

Sync Example

Imagine you want to read data from a source data store and write it to a destination data store. The requirements are not real-time. As long as the data arrives within 24 hours, everyone is happy.

Imagine the source data store will happily let you read 100,000 records per second.

Imagine the source data is bursty. Once per hour 1000,000 records show up in a few seconds and then nothing for the rest of the hour. And imagine the destination data store slows down when you make concurrent writes and it can’t handle batches larger than 1000 without spending much more money and re-architecture.

You can have a single Genserver responsible for writing to the destination.

Your code that consumes from the source data does not need to know anything about rate limiting or slowing down because it will receive back-pressure from the Genserver every time it tries to use call, which will block the process until it is done writing the batch to the destination.

Async example

Imagine you need to make 5 API requests and present a combination of all the data to the user. You could use Task.async to make all 5 requests, and after that, Task.await all of them.

If the Sync example is too slow

If you started with the sync example and you realize that you need to process faster, Elixir has a very deep toolbox for speeding things up by using an unbounded or configurable number of processes.

OvermindDL1

OvermindDL1

Something more simple:

Call a sync function when you want to wait on the result before doing more.

Call an async function when you want to do the call, do other stuff, then handle the result later, or if you don’t care about the result at all.

Popular Backend topics Top

New
New
New
First poster: bot
The Complete AWS Lambda Handbook for Beginners (Part 1). In the first part of our Complete AWS Lambda Handbook for Beginners, we explain...
New
finner
Just wondering how many devs out there are using Spring Reactive, specifically WebFlux?
New
First poster: bot
What's so exciting about Postgres? with Craig Kerstiens (The Changelog #417). PostgreSQL aficionado Craig Kerstiens joins Jerod to talk ...
New
DevotionGeo
How Dgraph was running out of memory for some users, and how Go’s Garbage collector wasn’t enough, and Dgraph team used jemalloc to manag...
New
mafinar
Hello folks! We had a pretty fun thread here around the same time last year - talking about Advent of Code problems. That also happened t...
New
jaeyson
Hey! Just a random thought though: Found an article from fudzilla where AI can be a good debugger. How does one integrate something like ...
New
lucasvegi
Hello guys! Perhaps some of you have already seen this invitation on other channels in the Elixir community or even responded to our sur...
New

Other popular topics Top

AstonJ
What chair do you have while working… and why? Is there a ‘best’ type of chair or working position for developers?
New
AstonJ
Or looking forward to? :nerd_face:
New
AstonJ
There’s a whole world of custom keycaps out there that I didn’t know existed! Check out all of our Keycaps threads here: https://forum....
New
rustkas
Intensively researching Erlang books and additional resources on it, I have found that the topic of using Regular Expressions is either c...
New
AstonJ
Biggest jackpot ever apparently! :upside_down_face: I don’t (usually) gamble/play the lottery, but working on a program to predict the...
New
AstonJ
Was just curious to see if any were around, found this one: I got 51/100: Not sure if it was meant to buy I am sure at times the b...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Author Spotlight Mike Riley @mriley This month, we turn the spotlight on Mike Riley, author of Portable Python Projects. Mike’s book ...
New
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Author Spotlight: Peter Ullrich @PJUllrich Data is at the core of every business, but it is useless if nobody can access and analyze ...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
A Ruby-Centric Chat with Noel Rappin @noelrappin Once you start noodling around with Ruby you quickly figure out, as Noel Rappi...
New