I feel like you're making an orthogonal statement related to cpu usage and the wait/spin settings for "cloud hardware".
CPU usage has no baring on transactions per second. So why are you bringing it up.
Spin/wait settings: how is "cloud hardware" different than "legacy hardware"? Both are servers located in a data center. Furthermore, the blog post goes to say that if you aren't running any other non-erlang services (you box is dedicated to Erlang) that you should KEEP the default setting of spin/wait since it won't cannobalize other services running on that box ... which is exactly how these benchmarks were tested.
The fact of the matter is, Erlang had lower transactions per second than most of the languages benchmarked. My insight from this HN discussion is that where Erlang shines is having consistently low latency/response time. It's not the fastest, but it's the most consistent even under load.
That's still really understating erlang's advantages though. Erlang is a lot easier to write working, custom concurrent and distributed systems in because of the design of its primitives and runtime. Erlang has a bunch of different advantes all related to controlling disparate pieces of software under one roof, so it's not easy to summarize why I love working with it in one comment.
In general, I think blog posts like this do a pretty bad job of explaining it. At some point I'll publish my take and hopefully it'll reach the front page here.
CPU usage has no baring on transactions per second. So why are you bringing it up.
Spin/wait settings: how is "cloud hardware" different than "legacy hardware"? Both are servers located in a data center. Furthermore, the blog post goes to say that if you aren't running any other non-erlang services (you box is dedicated to Erlang) that you should KEEP the default setting of spin/wait since it won't cannobalize other services running on that box ... which is exactly how these benchmarks were tested.
The fact of the matter is, Erlang had lower transactions per second than most of the languages benchmarked. My insight from this HN discussion is that where Erlang shines is having consistently low latency/response time. It's not the fastest, but it's the most consistent even under load.