Breaking Production: A look into Performance and Scalability

Speaker:
Amanda Sposito


Abstract:

This talk is for those already running Elixir in production and starting to face the realities of high traffic and performance bottlenecks. We’ll explore practical strategies to reduce latency, understand how Little’s Law applies in real-world systems, and how observability can guide better decisions. You’ll learn how Elixir’s architecture—including its powerful supervision trees—supports running millions of requests per minute with minimal maintenance. We’ll discuss what actually happens when traffic spikes, how latency responds, and how to use monitoring and metrics to stay ahead of scaling challenges. By the end, you will have a better idea of how to optimize your Elixir systems based on the specific performance demands your team is facing.