More on Erlang's i/o Rationale

From Ulf Wiger of Ericsson on the erlang-questions email list, regarding the performance of some of the i/o functions...

One reason is that file IO in Erlang has traditionally been tuned in order to be as unobtrusive as possible, in massively concurrent systems. For example, Mnesia's log dumps usually run in the background at low priority in such systems, and the more important IO is the signaling to/from the network. In these systems, writes to disk are uncommon, and reading large volumes of data from disk only occurs at restarts (which are - hopefully - exceedingly uncommon).

While we've noticed for a long time that Erlang's IO generally sucks in benchmarks that test raw sequential speed on one large file or one socket, it hasn't been clear that this adversely affects the key products using Erlang.

I'm sure that we can find ways to speed up such IO without adversely affecting the characteristics of massively concurrent IO. As Erlang is spreading more into other application areas, this is bound to be a major issue.