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The Curious Case of Beam CPU Usage (2019)
While benchmarking Go vs Elixir vs Node, we discovered that Elixir (running on the BEAM virtual machine) had much higher CPU usage than Go, and yet its responsiveness remained excellent. Some of our readers suggested that busy waiting might be responsible for this behavior.
The standard way of handling this is to let the operating system kernel manage synchronization in such a way that, while waiting for an event, other threads get the opportunity to run. In addition, when running BEAM in the cloud on burstable performance instances, busy waiting may result in spending unnecessary CPU credits. When running BEAM on an OS kernel shared with other software, it makes sense to turn off busy waiting, to avoid stealing time from non-BEAM processes.
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